


Mean Time to Breakdown

by Leaty



Category: Katawa Shoujo
Genre: 4LS April Fool's 2013 "KS2" Characters, Ascended Background Characters, Canon Divergence, Drama, F/F, Mild Angst, Minor Original Character(s), Original Flavor, POV First Person, Present Tense, Romance, Single Point of Departure
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-05-13
Updated: 2015-04-01
Packaged: 2018-02-11 09:52:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 71,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2063592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leaty/pseuds/Leaty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During a confession to the boy she had liked for years, Iwanako Daidouji collapsed in the snow from a sudden heart attack. Arrhythmia, they called it. She spent four months in the hospital, her world shattered to bits.</p><p>Now, one year remaining in her high school career, she's being sent to Yamaku Academy, a strange school that she knows nothing about. Haunted by fear and insecurities, she has no choice but to put one foot in front of the other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Frozen Sopor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All things may change, but some things never go right.

I can hear the sound of the snow crunching underneath my feet, even despite the winds raging between the trees.  
  
This place is so beautiful in the summer... The enclosure of trees provides sanctuary from the gaze and the sounds of teachers and students. The leaves have since fallen, and now the copse seems bare, almost skeletal. Still, though... with the snowflakes falling dreamily from a bleached white sky, I think this place is more beautiful than ever.  
  
That's why I chose this place. This is where I want things to begin.  
  
The freshly fallen snow is almost pristine, save for a single pair of footprints into the woods. I feel a flutter in my chest, and focusing on the metronymic sound of the snow crackling under my feet is the only way I can keep from losing my resolve. As it is, I know I'm almost twenty minutes late. It took me that long simply to conquer my own anxieties.  
  
I must have thrown away ten drafts of that note before I was finally able convince myself that one was flawless. Even then, I couldn't work up the nerve to deliver it myself. I handed it over to a friend. That was this morning. I've hardly been able to concentrate on anything else since that moment.  
  
I finally see him, facing away from me, breathing into his hands to fight the numbing winter cold. The sight of him causes my heart to race, and despite the biting winds, I can feel my face get hot with embarrassment. He's freezing because I've kept him waiting out here for half an hour.  
  
Not a good start. I almost lose my nerve and turn around, but the same anxiety that makes me want to give up is also paralyzing me, keeping me bolted to where I'm standing.  
  
No. There won’t be any turning back.  
  
"Hi... Hisao? You came?"  
  
A stammering, painfully obvious question. I internally wince at my words. Didn't I have something else to say? Didn't I practice something? Why can't I remember?  
  
I feel my heart skip a beat as my voice reaches his ear and he starts to turn around. His eyes meet my own and I momentarily forget not to look like I'm completely petrified.  
  
He starts to say something, and my heart begins to race even before he's finished his first sentence.  
  
I don't think I even hear what he says. All I can focus on is the tenor of his voice. I recognize what's in his hand, though. The eleventh draft. The note I haven't seen since this morning.  
  
"Ahmm... yes," I say, as if I'm still somewhat uncertain, "I asked a friend to give you that note..."  
  
Smile, stupid. Smile. Don't look terrified.  
  
"I'm so glad you got it."  
  
This time, he doesn't say anything. He seems... dumbfounded. I start to feel like an idiot. My heart is pounding now, hard, as though it were striking me in protest, chastising me for being a fool.

After what seems like a century, he finally speaks again. "So... ah... here we are. Out in the cold..."  
  
Again, the wind begins to roar through the woods. I feel it brush against me and I can’t help but flinch against the force of it. In truth, I'm not dressed for this weather, though I don't feel cold at all, anymore. I stand up straighter, despite the wind.  
  
His eyes are earnest and excited. A part of me never would have dreamed the two of us would be here, having a moment like this. My heart thumps anxiously, each beat sounding with greater and greater urgency. I can’t... what was it I was going to say to him?  
  
My throat is tight; speech is a challenge, now. Determined, I will myself to force out the words.   
  
"Y," I gasp, "You see..."  
  
_thump_  
  
"...I w, I wanted to... know..."  
  
_thumpthump_  
  
"...if, yyyou'd g, go out with ME..."  
  
He stand there, motionless, and I see his eyes wash over with... apprehension? Horror? I think I’ve done something wrong; whatever it was, I know I must say something else, but... I suddenly realize it’s gone. My voice... There’s something wrong with my voice...  
  
"...Iwanako?"

Without warning, my throat erupts into pain.   
  
I try to clutch my neck, to quell this  _inferno_  spreading into my chest, but as I try to move my arms they  _wail_  in protest...   
  
"Iwanako?!"  
  
_thump_  
  
My whole body goes rigid, betraying me, except for my eyes, which only express terror.  
  
_thumpthumpthumpthump_  
  
"IWANAKO!"  
  
Then the building pressure in my chest dies away. I break apart onto the virgin snow.  
  
This beautiful wood, where I wanted everything to begin — the obsidian trees, the howl of the wind, Hisao running towards me — all of it fades to white. The last thing I remember before the world goes away is the feeling of his hand on my cheek and the snow against my bare skin...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Most scenes aren't this short—this scene and the next scene collectively make up the prologue.
> 
> Right! So... as you can see, this is an AU fic! A Single Point of Departure fic, in fact, meaning that literally everything in the universe is identical to the visual novel except that Iwanako has arrhythmia instead of Hisao.
> 
> This is actually a mirror—the main hub for updates and commentary on this fic is at the official Katawa Shoujo forums in its dedicated thread at http://ks.renai.us/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=6413 . There's some other goodies there too, such as a Google Docs version of this story with musical cues and extended scene-by-scene Author's Notes. Thank you for reading!
> 
> Oh, and one last thing—this IS, absolutely, an F/F fic. However, any actual romantic content to that effect is going to take a while to start materializing. This story is more about drama than shipping.


	2. Salvage Operation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not all epiphanies are pleasant.

That was four months ago.  
  
I can hardly believe it even happened, now. I've been in this room for so long, I started to wonder if it wasn't all some fleeting dream.

The only reason I know it isn’t is because everyone in my world seems to know about it. But that isn’t as many people as there used to be. Everything's a microcosm of what came before. I've only seen a fraction of the people I thought I knew. But from those I have seen, I no longer have any secrets.  
  
It's not a pleasant thing to think about. But in the four months that I've been here, there haven't exactly been a lot of other options.  
  
Hisao personally carried me to the nurse's office. I later found out that, were it not for his quick reaction, I may have died out there. It was supposed to make me feel better. But in truth, I still felt dead regardless.  
  
_Arrhythmia_. If you’re willing to give it a little thought, it’s not too hard to tease the meaning out of a word like that. Tachycardia is much harder. That's what my arrhythmia can cause: a rapid, dangerously fast heart rate. It can be fatal.  
  
‘Ignorance is Bliss.’ I’d heard that maxim before, but before I woke up in this bed, I never really gave it any thought. Apparently, though, I had been afflicted by this condition for a long time. My whole life? I learned it was highly unusual that I had been able to live so long without something like this happening. 

_Lucky_ , I thought. 

_A miracle,_  they said. 

_A joke,_  I thought.

Unsurprisingly, my parents were sanguine about the entire situation. They could afford the treatment, after all. Their more pressing concern was the revelation that the disorder was genetic. As it happened, though, my older brother didn't have it, so all was well. As long as he was fine, a minor inconvenience like this was no trouble at all.  
  
A minor inconvenience like me.  
  
My brother never actually visited me in the hospital. I thought he might show up, eventually, but that day never came. He sent me flowers and candies, and, allegedly, left a voicemail on the phone I hadn't seen since that day in the snow. Months went by, though, and not once did he ever show his face. I began to forget what he looked like. I knew he was busy—he’d always been—but I found it exasperating, this idea that I could drop dead any moment, never seeing him again.  
  
While his absence was troubling, my classmates’ near-constant presence was just aggravating. The first week I was there, there always seemed to be some visitors beside my bed, even people I hadn't spoken to in years. Time passed and I slowly came to the realization that all this attention was the result of a class project. It was stifling, being surrounded by all those people. I was a captive in my own bed, compelled to endure a cacophony of chatter and small talk that persisted until the late evenings. It came as a relief when their interest waned after only a week and I never saw any of them again.  
  
Even after that first week, though, my friends continued to trickle in for a while afterward. Some of these friends I’d known for years, and in the past they’d been an inexhaustible source of support and understanding. They continued to provide me with both, but it just wasn’t nourishing anymore. Those friends whose jokes I always laughed at now began to seem obnoxious. I always used to enjoy gossip, but the newest anecdotes all seemed so abstract and pointless. My friends’ support felt hollow, superficial. Above all, it was painfully obvious that not a single one of them had even the slightest idea what I was going through. Our lives had always been so ordinary and carefree; our friendships had never been tested by fire.  
  
Those close, loyal friendships felt so tacky and soulless now. In the end, I think I pushed them all away.  
  
Hisao was the last to stop coming. His visits were the worst.  
  
He visited me several times a week, but I never knew what to say to him. I was… grateful for everything he had done, but I couldn’t bear to look him in the eyes. There was never much for us to talk about, and I _hated_ how he would look at me. My reflection in the mirror was that of a corpse. I was losing weight rapidly, my hair was a tangled mess, and I was rarely out of a hospital gown. I hated him seeing me like that. I hated the undercurrent in his voice when he would offer to help me over to the bathroom.  
  
My new condition had brought out the worst in me. I knew it, and it was driving me crazy to have him always here, constantly _seeing_ me like this. Every time he came through the door, the disappointment was plain on his face, so the consistency of his visits baffled me. We never had any fun and it was obvious he’d rather be somewhere else. Some evenings we never even spoke at all.  
  
After six weeks of protracted silence, I finally realized why he continued to visit me. The narrative of our relationship had come into focus. He _couldn’t_ be the boy who abandoned me on what might easily be my death bed. Even if others had already done that, he would never accept that of himself. Even if it was what he really wanted.  
  
So, shortly after the beginning of what would have been spring vacation, I finally broke our enduring silence. In unambiguous terms, I told him to stop coming to visit me.  
  
His expression was blank for a moment, but, finally, he nodded. Something quickly crossed his face—gratitude? Then he turned away, and disappeared into the hallway. I never saw him again.  
  
And that was that. That snowy day in the woods was washed away.  
  
The hospital isn't where you go to live; it's where you go to die. I certainly felt like my life was over after that day.  
  
The doctors and nurses seemed to notice how withdrawn I was becoming. Though I never asked, they started to make comments about how I'd probably get released soon. Quietly, I kind of wondered if the treatment and surgeries would actually work.  
  
I was so ashamed of this hideous, crimson scar between my breasts. I would often stare at it, wondering when it would finally go away. It never did, though, not completely. But it was the only indicator of the passage of time that truly mattered to me.  
  
The head cardiologist doesn't come around that often. Now, whenever I see her, I ignore her. She has no interest in answering my questions and I certainly have no interest in being patronized.  
  
Eventually, I started watching TV. Not for any reason in particular; I almost never watched it before my heart attack. But now, it felt nice to slip into the saccharine monotony the television offered and quash my own anxieties, if only for a few hours.  
  
My parents set me up with a portable movie player in the early days here, one of the many lavish gifts they showered me with to obfuscate the fact that they didn't actually care to come visit me. But I relished it. As soon as the credits began to roll, I would swap the disc out for another. The genre of movie didn’t matter. Hollywood movies, independent movies, classic movies, documentaries... As my parents visited less and less often, more and more of these movies appeared in my hospital room.  
  
Eventually I accepted that I liked it better this way. That was just what my life was like.  
  
Every day was the same. Winter eventually passed without me realizing it; I never looked out the window. All I could ever really see was a parking garage, anyway. The only difference between days was what movies I was watching. Even the meals were redundant.  
  
Eventually, it became a relief of sorts. With every moment so ephemeral, it became easier to cope with the reality of my situation. It was only when I paused to remember all the things I'd lost that the pain came rushing back.  
  
There were some days I knew I was going to cry. I waited until I was alone and sobbed into my pillow. I didn't want anybody to see me. I didn't want to be showered with anyone's pity.  
  
But those days started to disappear as the year yawned on. Eventually I forgot what it felt like to cry.  
  
Today the doctor comes into my room and gives me a smile. I try to be friendly. I remember I used to be friendly, once; sociable, even. Wasn't I?  
  
My parents follow behind her. It feels like it's been years since I saw them last. The two of them are even more dressed up than usual. ...What's going on? Am I going to die? Regardless of my despair, I _thought_ I was getting better.  
  
The head cardiologist doesn't waste time making small talk about what I'm doing or even about the movie I'm watching. I move to shut it off.  
  
"Good morning to you, Iwanako."  
  
_Smile, stupid. Smile. Don't look terrified._  
  
"It looks like you can go home," she says. "Your heart is stronger, now, and as long as you take care of yourself, you should be alright. We have all your medication sorted out. We're getting the prescription ready for your parents."  
  
I feel like I should be relieved, but I feel my stomach sink with anticipatory dread. She hands a sheet of paper to my father, who rolls it up in his hands without reading it.  
  
I glance at him in consternation. "Well, don't I get to see it?"  
  
There's a pause, and reluctantly, he slides the paper over to me. I open it up and peer through it, but immediately realize I needn’t have bothered. I’m not limber enough, intellectually _or_ emotionally, to assimilate even a single of this. It’s as though I've melted my brain watching action movies and bad television. In retrospect, though, this was never my strong suit, even when I was at my best.  
  
I do understand it enough to know that there's an absolutely ludicrous amount of medication here. Medication with an even more ludicrous menagerie of side effects.  
  
This is my life, now. I already knew as much.  
  
"I know it's going to be hard on you," the doctor says.  
  
_Do you really?_  "That's fine," I say.  
  
"There's always new treatments for heart disease coming out, so try not to look at this as a life sentence."  
  
A poor choice of words on her part. "That's fine," I say.  
  
"Also, I had a chat with your parents and we agreed it would be best that you don't return to your old school."  
  
They all pause, as if they expect me to be surprised. They’re studying the expression on my face as though it’s the surface of Mars. They’re looking for some kind of reaction, perhaps indignation or anger, some sort of vivid emotion to shine through the grey. I’m going to disappoint them, then, because I think they’re absolutely correct.  
  
It's been so long since I last attended class there that I can hardly remember what it was like. It feels like it wasn't even me, like I can't remember those days in the first person. What would be the point of going back? Nothing would be the same. All my friends left me for dead, or at least willfully abandoned me to my own agonies. And... Hisao's still there. I don't think I could ever look him in the eyes again.  
  
If I’m going to embrace the charade that my hopes and dreams are still intact, despite my having the permanence of a mayfly, then they’re right. I need to purge these obstacles and unpleasant distractions from my life.  
  
"...That's fine," I say.  
  
My parents seem dumbfounded by my blasé response. The doctor breaks the silence. "We know your schooling is important, but..."  
  
My attention drifts away. I don't need an explanation. They’ll do what they’ll do.  
  
More talking, more sounds of superfluous justification. My father says something else. I tune out the noise and reach for an open can of juice. It’s warm, now. I’m upset I didn’t finish it earlier.  
  
"Iwanako!"  
  
Reflexively, I meet my mother’s gaze, compelled by the urgency of her voice.  
  
"Did you hear that?" My mother asks. "It has a 24-hour nursing staff and it's very close to a general hospital. You'll get to live on campus."  
  
This is very unlike my parents. Why are they advocating this as if I had a choice in the matter? Am I such a broken thing now that even the ultimatums must be sugar-coated?  
  
"Sounds good to me," I say, my voice barely breaking a whisper.  
  
That seems to be the end of it. I don’t really have anything else to say. The conversation comes to a lull and I find myself contemplating what the weather will be like outside.  
  
"HEY!"  
  
I suddenly look up from my juice, surprised by the Doctor’s outburst. She looks annoyed with me.  
[](https://youtu.be/Wy_4lad-M_s)  
"Look, I don't think you realize how lucky you are. Compared to a lot of other patients I'm seeing right now, you're going to live a long time, provided you don't lie around  _sulking.”_  
  
_...What?_  
  
“If you’re at all interested in having a decent life, you could start by adjusting that _terrible attitude_ of yours!”  
  
So. This is how she really feels about me? I should merely feel petulant, yet… It _hurts._ Something about her words punches me in the gut.

I feel my lips part involuntarily, too startled by her frankness even to be offended by her sudden lack of professionalism.  
  
“If you ever plan on getting a job, you could do a lot worse than going to Yamaku Academy. In fact, you’re l _ucky_  to go. You’re getting a second chance; take my advice and make the best of it, because this hospital bed won't be here for you forever. We’re going to give it to somebody who actually  _is_ going to die."  
  
Doing nothing to conceal her impatience, the doctor turns to my parents and informs them where the out-processing office is before walking briskly out of the room. My parents both look too flabbergasted to protest.  
  
I’m feeling dazed. I can feel my stomach turn. I hadn’t known I’d made somebody so disgusted with me... I hadn’t realized anybody else thought I was becoming a horrible person.   
  
“Iwanako,” my father says, hastily moving in to soften the blow I’ve just been dealt, “We know this isn’t exactly fair to you. Nothing about this has been fair to you.”  
  
He pauses, sighs, rubs his nose, and then continues, looking weary. “Lately, though, we’ve noticed a drastic change in your temperament, and we’re very concerned. It’s as though you’ve given up on everything.”  
  
_Haven’t I, though?_  
  
I’ve never had the fighting spirit I’ve admired in others. Everything in my life has been going downhill since that day in the snow. Rather than try to fight that reality, I accepted it.  
  
This has been perhaps the first time in my adult life that I’ve truly been tested by anything, and I’ve failed miserably. I’m pathetic.  
  
My mother places her hand on mine, stroking my knuckles with her thumb. I gaze blankly into the enamel of her nail polish.  
  
“We’re trying to give you a fresh start. A new outlook on life. One of your father’s business partners has a son at Yamaku, and we’re told he loves it there. It’s out in the country, it’s beautiful. And I can visit every weekend, if that’s what you want. We just want you to be happy.”  
  
I realize there’s sincere concern in his voice, and for some reason it floods me with sorrow. The conviction I had in my parents’ indifference is starting to crumble. It should be a relief, but it’s just the opposite. I’m beginning to doubt _everything_.  
  
Against my better judgment, I manage to look my parents in the eyes. Both of them actually look _dejected_. It’s the first time in a while that I’ve felt like my parents truly cared about my feelings. Has my fatalism scared them so thoroughly that they could no longer be complacent? Or have I simply been misreading their feelings this whole time?  
  
It doesn’t matter. I feel the weight behind my face and I suddenly know I’m about to cry, but I can’t come up with an excuse to get them out of here so I can do it in private. And then I run out of time as the dam bursts and the tears start flowing out as all my regrets rush in, no longer barricaded by my mask of ennui.  
  
A new start.  
  
Okay. I’ll make the best of it. I will. I’m finally starting to see who I am, and it’s terrifying.  
  
More than simply dying, the thought of dying as  _this person_ is the most frightening of all.

 


	3. Slow Code to China

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When all else fails, throw money at the problem. 
> 
> Yoshizumi Daidouji is good at that.

I don’t remember anything else about that day. I was ushered out of the hospital so quickly, it felt like a jailbreak, as if my parents worried the doctors might soon change their minds.  
  
I spent that night at home for the first time since my heart attack. I thought my room would feel reassuringly familiar after so long in the hospital, but enough time had passed that the tables had turned. I’d spent a lot of time personalizing and beautifying my room, but now it seemed… uncanny. It wasn’t how I remembered it. The atmosphere felt heavier, somehow. The air didn’t smell right.  
  
The flowers I’d placed in the windowsill in February had died from four months of negligence. Now, nothing remained but dried brown husks, jutting out morbidly from macabre pots of dirt. Besides that, nothing about my room had changed. My bed was still prepared the exact same way I’d left it four months ago, and an unfinished homework assignment was sitting on my desk, waiting, absurdly, to be completed. My desk calendar sat faithfully behind it, still displaying that date in February when my entire life fell to pieces. For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to correct it.  
  
The recently-laundered school uniform I’d surely never wear again. The posters of musicians whose music I no longer had any desire to hear. The book on my nightstand I didn’t remember starting and didn’t think I’d ever finish. The photographs of vacations and class trips so nebulous in my memories, they felt like mythology. The stuffed animals whose friendly, earnest expressions made me want to weep.  
  
My room was filled with my belongings. So why did it feel so much like I was invading a stranger’s room? How come none of my possessions felt like my own? Why couldn’t I overcome this chilling sensation that I was excavating the bedroom of a girl who’d recently passed away?  
  
It felt so ghoulish just to lie in my own bed. I didn’t think I’d ever get to sleep, but I underestimated the potency of my nighttime medications. The enforced drowsiness ushered me into unconsciousness, careless of my waking anxieties.

* * *

My mother gently shakes me awake, and by the time my eyes open has already assembled my morning medications, next to a steaming cup of tea.  
  
Right now, I’m too groggy to make out much of what she’s saying. She’s stroking my hair, though, and smiling warmly, so I can’t help but smile back. It’s too early for me to recall my feelings about anything.  
  
I take a sip of tea. It’s the good stuff, Baihao Yinzhen with rose pearls and a touch of lychee honey. Sweet enough that I’m able, however temporarily, to forget the bitterness of the endless pills and tablets she eases into my hand. The last time I remember my mother pampering me like this, I was just a little girl. I can’t even remember the last time anybody’s come into my room to wake me up. I’ve always been early riser.  
  
Or, at least, I used to be. Now, it’s anybody’s guess.  
  
It’s an important day for me. Tomorrow, I’m starting school at Yamaku. This is the last day I’ll be spending in this city, at least for a while. The first day since my heart attack that I’m free to walk around like a normal person.  
  
It’s the first day of the rest of my life. Since everything that’s happened, what was once an insipid platitude now has a disturbing sort of resonance with me.  
  
I think it’s an important day for my mother, too, though she’ll never say it aloud, not to me. It’s the first day of her restitution towards me. She feels guilty for everything that’s happened to me, like she’s somehow directly responsible for my suffering. Of course she isn’t; no one is, but could anyone convince their mother otherwise?  
  
Truthfully, if anybody feels guilty, it’s me. I’ve understood for a long time now that I was not my parents’ favorite child, but as long as they held _any_ affection for me, at _all_ , I never felt much envy or resentment. Since yesterday, however, it’s started to feel like I’ve dragged them into caring for my well-being, like I’ve manipulated them into treasuring the time they spend with me. It feels like acting out.  
  
“Come on, honey, take a shower and get ready,” she says. “We’re going shopping today, remember?”  
  
I nod. “Right.”  
  
I smile again and disembark from the bed, drifting towards the bathroom like a dislodged cobweb. I already know she’s going to shower me with gifts today. With any luck, it’ll make the two of us feel better, distract us from our problems, maybe make the pain go away a little. I can’t say that the whole time I was lying on a hospital bed, I was dying to go to the _mall_ , but as far as quick fixes go, this one definitely bears more promise than most.  
  
I need new clothes, anyway. I’ve lost too much weight. This negligee used to be flattering on me, but now it may as well have been the hospital gown.  
  
I pull it over my head and fold it up next to the bathroom sink. On the interior side of the bathroom door, I can see my whole body in the full-length mirror. Waifish. Emaciated. Even my face seems different, more angular and gaunt. There are dark circles under my eyes that I never had in February.  
  
I never thought myself one of the great beauties of our school. I looked… nice, I think. I think I received a respectable amount of attention. I remember the compliments. This is the first time I’ve really looked at my body in natural light since being hospitalized, though, and… I don’t think I’ll get those compliments anymore. I look frightening, even without the angry scarlet line cascading down my sternum.  
  
As the warm water from the shower caresses me, my mind begins to wander. I can’t help but think about tomorrow. Yamaku Academy… It’s a school for ruined and defective youths like me. But that’s all I really know about it. That could mean anything.  
  
I remember seeing something on television, some kind of educational show or news program or something. It was about a baby in America with some kind of rare genetic mutation. As a result, she was born without a face. Her entire head was some sort of misshapen, malformed monstrosity, barely recognizable as human. It suddenly occurs to me there could be kids at Yamaku with that problem. There could be several, even.  
  
The girls could all look like that, I suppose. Compared to them, even now, I suppose I’d look like a  _goddess._  So beautiful, I could have my pick of  _all_ the mangled boys in the school.  
  
…  
  
Ugh. I’ve never been so disgusted with myself in my life. What kind of person would think this way? When was I  _ever_  this deranged?  
  
This is something I need to work on. I’m not worthy of anybody’s affection with such horrible things in my head. And everybody’s counting on me to force them out.

* * *

In spite of how many horrible thoughts I had today, I still enjoyed a fairly rewarding shopping spree. Karma, assuming it actually exists, doesn’t seem to know what to do with me. It’s like I’m constantly ricocheting in and out of grace, these days.  
  
Going to the shopping center was… strange. I’m unused to being around so many people now. I have to admit, I expected to be stared at, even though my scar was well-hidden under my shirt. Even my tightest clothes felt loose on me, and I thought I looked ridiculous. Maybe I’m already beginning to regard myself as grotesque.  
  
I managed to find clothes that managed to make me look like something other than a cadaver, though; mostly items with high or otherwise nonexistent necklines, to keep my scar concealed, and long skirts to downplay my increasingly bony legs. I’m leaving it up to faith that a situation won’t come up where I’ll be forced into a swimsuit. I suppose in that case, I could cover up the scar with some foundation, assuming I didn’t have to actually go _into_ the water.  
  
There were moments I thought for sure a piece of clothing I liked was too expensive to purchase. My mother was adamant, though. We’ve always been... fairly well-off, but this display of generosity made me squirm a little. The idea that she’d be so determined not to let anything obstruct my happiness makes me feel really sheepish. She’s never treated me with such importance before.  
  
She’s doing a good job, though. I was skeptical that a shopping trip would have any ability to lighten my spirits, but with the bags in my hand, I’m starting to feel, well, _renewed_ , in a way. It’s like the opposite of that foreboding feeling I felt in my room last night. These are all new things. No baggage from the past. No regrets.  
  
To cap off the day, my mother took me to get a haircut. It’s been awhile since the last time I’ve gotten one. This isn’t the same salon I usually go to, though—this is an upscale one with ridiculous prices. The waiting area is filled with posh, trendy-looking women wearing cutting-edge fashions. At least, I  _think_ they’re cutting-edge. It’s been four months since I’ve seen any clothes other than scrubs and lab coats.  
  
I expect to be waiting a while, but not long after the clock hits what my mother informs me is my scheduled appointment time, a cheery and chic-looking stylist calls me over to her chair and wraps me in a cutting cape.  
  
“So, what were you looking to do today?”  
  
I freeze, as though struck with stage fright. As foolish as it sounds… I honestly don’t know the answer. In the past, I’ve always worn my hair just to my shoulders, with a fringe. I don’t think I’ve changed it from that simple formula since grade school. My hair grows relatively fast, though, and in its current, neglected state, it’s the longest it’s ever been. The fringe is gone almost completely, having settled into a simple rift straight down the middle, and I can feel my hair tickling the center of my back.  
  
The elegant solution would be simply to go with the haircut I’ve always had, but… No. I can’t bear to do it. It’s just… obsolete. Obsolete like my room, my old clothes, that calendar on my desk. Outmoded, in a way I find more than a little jarring. It feels like denial. Like pretending I never collapsed in the snow back in February. Like pretending I don’t have these dark circles under my eyes.  
  
I’ve got no interest in going down that road. I can’t help but feel certain it would only harm me.  
  
“I think I’m going to grow it out, so just a trim would be fine, please.”  
  
The stylist grins, and shoots me the thumbs-up. “You got it.”  
  
I feel a fluttering in my stomach, but it’s a good sensation as the stylist’s scissors begin to tap away at my hair. My eyes slowly begin to shut, my body beginning to enter a sublime state of contentment. Despite my very real apprehensions about going to Yamaku, it’s liberating, knowing I won’t have to undertake some effete struggle to restore the things I’ve already lost.  
  
Everything right now is such a mess, but I’m being allowed to just leave that mess where it sits and move forward. Even if that just means something as simple as retiring a haircut that doesn’t work anymore.  
  
After a couple moments, the tapping of the scissors slows to a stop, and there’s a brief silence before I look up to see the stylist contemplating me with a mildly chagrined expression.  
  
“Um, miss? Would you like me to add color today as well? To darken it a little?”  
  
I can’t help but raise a baffled eyebrow at her. My hair is completely sable. It’s not going to get any darker. “What for?”  
  
She pauses, as if trying to come up with a diplomatic answer, before pulling a hand mirror off the table and holding it close to my face, gesturing to my temples with her thumb and forefinger.  
  
”Well, you can see it’s a little lighter here and here.”  
  
…?!

...Grey.

Not many. Just a couple of strands on both sides of my head, at the roots. I had never even noticed until this moment. But they’re there, completely obvious if you’re looking for them, grey as granite. I… this… I don’t even know what to say. This is horrifying.

I’m not even eighteen yet. How could this possibly be happening to me? Those roots weren’t grey four months ago. Was the stress and anxiety from the surgery enough to make me start going prematurely grey? Or is this just… some sort of serendipitous misfortune? Why would my own body be so perfectly devoted to crushing my spirit?  
  
“Miss? Are you alright?”  
  
I know she’s waiting for an answer, but I need to take a moment to address the implications of this first.  
  
“I… sorry. I need a moment to think.”  
  
I glance over to the waiting area. My mother’s still sitting there, casually reading a book, oblivious to my state of disturbance. Mother is only forty years old. In spite of that fact, or perhaps because of it, she’s still incredibly beautiful, almost absurdly so. My father’s always made more than enough to provide us with an embarrassingly carefree lifestyle. I wonder if Mother was ever troubled by  _anything_ before my heart revealed itself to be so unserviceable.  
  
She doesn’t have any grey in her hair yet, not that I’m aware of. I can’t help but realize that I’m not even going to live to be as old as she is at this moment. They say I’ll be fortunate to live past thirty.  
  
If I’m going to die at thirty, than aren’t I already over the hill? I’m more than halfway through my life. Speaking in terms of our lifespans, aren’t I actually older than Mother, now? Maybe it’s only fair that I go grey before she does.  
  
She finally notices me staring at her, and smiles, winking at me. Even now, she’s so poised, so unflappable. Preposterously, I feel a pang of jealousy for mother’s youthfulness.

I heave a sigh. This is stupid.

 The moment I begin to turn my truncated lifespan into an identity, I may as well give up on self-improvement entirely. I didn’t just buy a whole new wardrobe’s worth of fashionable clothing and accessories just to go around feeling like an old woman. And I can think of nothing more characteristic of an old woman than going out of my way just to bring my hair back to its original color. Just to restore what’s been lost.  
  
Dying at thirty doesn’t mean I’m an old woman. It means I’m _never_ going to be an old woman. It means I’m going to die beautiful. Perhaps if my attitude was a little more like my mother’s, these grey roots would never have appeared in the first place.  
  
So let’s do something crazy. Something youthful.  
  
I make eye contact with the stylist, who has been waiting patiently for my wave of angst to disperse. “Um, I don’t really feel like dyeing my hair just to cover up a few strands. Couldn’t we do something in the opposite direction?”  
  
She rubs her chin contemplatively. “What, like a blonde streak?”  
  
I nod vigorously, running my fingers across the locks of hair at the front of my face. “Oh, blonde streaks, could you do that?”  
  
She nods. “Sure, it’s kind of eccentric, but under the circumstances… Yeah, I could definitely make it look cool for you. How about just lightening everything in front?”  
  
I nod. “Please do what you think is best.”


	4. The Shallow End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Parting can be such sweet sorrow, but meetings are often just plain sorrow.

My mother keeps moving, vexed, from one side of the gate to the other, looking for some kind of cleverly-concealed electronic panel with which to page the school. After four fruitless cycles of this, she moves back over to me and places a hand on her hip, looking defeated.  
  
“Well, I’m out of ideas,” she sighs.  
  
It’s certainly an impregnable-looking gate, and it’s kind of puzzling to me that it would be closed like this at the start of the school day. This is the only entrance I can see, though. I take a step forward and push lightly on the left door. It opens, without any resistance at all.  
  
Mother blinks at me. “Oh, I thought we tried that already.”  
  
We kind of stand there awkwardly for a moment, before I decide to end the tension and head in. Mother follows along silently. I won’t tell anybody about this if she won’t.  
  
Inside the gate, there’s a paved path surrounded by some impressive and fairly expensive-looking landscaping. It’s more like what you’d see at a golf course than a school. With what I’m given to understand about Yamaku’s funding, it’s almost certainly professionally maintained.  
  
I’ve always loved natural beauty, but this isn’t really my style. I prefer nature preserves and arboretums to any kind of heavily-engineered landscape architecture. This sort of stodgy aesthetic tends to go over well in retirement centers and nursing homes, the kind of place where caged finches are put on display in day rooms for the lukewarm amusement of geriatric spinsters in squeaking wheelchairs.  
  
Well, Yamaku ought to have the “wheelchair” part down, at any rate.  
  
That’s a nasty thought, though, and counterintuitive. I  _wanted_  to be here. For all intents and purposes, this is where I belong, at least for the time being. It’s unrealistic to be unhappy just because this place can’t make me forget I have a problem.  
  
My mother makes a comment about the buildings looking nice. I nod in agreement. They’re certainly different from what I’m used to. It gives me hope that there are other pleasant surprises to be found here.  
  
We got here early, so there are a handful of students walking to their morning classes, but not many. I don’t get a good look at any of them, but from far off they look okay — no girls without faces or conjoined twins or anything like that. It’s kind of reassuring. I’d probably feel like I was trespassing otherwise.  
  
Before long, the path forks and I realize my mother and I are going to have to part ways. I need to head down to the main building, while Mother’s going to bring my belongings to the dorms before heading home. This is… probably the last time I’m going to see her for a while.  
  
Well, it’s not as dramatic as all that, actually. She said she would visit on the weekends if I wanted, and I’m sure I will, eventually. I certainly enjoyed our outing yesterday. Anyway, Mother doesn’t maintain a busy schedule by any means.  
  
Even though I’ve already resolved not to think of this as a momentous occasion, it doesn’t stop my mother from pulling me into a loving embrace, cradling me in her arms and whispering reassurances into my ear, like I’m still a kindergartener. It’s a little embarrassing, and there are undoubtedly bemused students watching, but I don’t have the stamina to resist it. And, frankly, I have to admit it’s sort of nice, after all this time. I can’t help but think about how finite these moments are, especially now.  
  
“Mother… I’ll be fine,” I finally say. “I’ll be sure to call you this evening.”  
  
She pulls away, and the air that fills the space between us feels cold against my skin. She doesn’t look at all troubled, but there’s a sort of amateurish quality to her mannerisms, as though this is the first day of a new job.  
  
“Is there anything you need me to get you before I head back home?”  
  
I shake my head in the negative. “If I think of something, I’ll call you, I promise.”  
  
She sighs, and gingerly runs a hand through my hair. “I guess we’ll see each other later, then.”  
  
Not wanting to drag this moment out, I nod and smile, resolutely turning toward the main building before she can present me an opportunity to gaze morosely at her.  
  
As I stand in front of the distinguished-looking building, I feel as though I’m overlooking something significant, but this isn’t the time or the place for navel-gazing. It’s a pastime I’d be best-suited to giving up entirely, were such a thing possible.  
  
The handle of the front door feels light against my fingers. A surge of anxiety flares up inside me, and I try to focus on my reflection in the glass window. The newly-golden streaks in my brand-new haircut. The immaculately-applied premium cosmetics. The sparkling moonstone earrings. My white gold claddagh ring and silver charm bracelet. All the blessings my mother rained upon me yesterday.  
  
_Who is that girl?_  I think, trying to force sincerity upon myself.  _Wow, she’s totally cool_!  
  
My reflection quirks an eyebrow, as though wordlessly asking if I’m an idiot. Oh, to hell with this. I open the door.  
  
A tall, sloppy-looking middle-aged guy is looking straight at me as I head inside. I suddenly realize from his side of the door, he could have been watching me making faces at my reflection in the window. Just like clockwork, I can feel my face going crimson.  
  
“You must be… um…Daijou… Daito…”  
  
“Daidouji,” I interject, trying my best to meet his eyes. They’re weary ones.  
  
He nods, and shows no reaction to his obvious failure to remember more than one character in my name. I get the impression that these sorts of encounters are something he’s good at through repetition, not any kind of social savvy.  
  
“…Daidouji. It’s nice to meet you. I’ll be your homeroom and science teacher. My name is Mutou. Welcome.”  
  
We shake hands, though mine is practically tissue paper.  
  
“The head nurse wanted to see you for a brief check-in. You’re here early, so we can get it done now, if you like.”  
  
This seems like one of those illusory options. “Ah, y-yes,” I stammer. “Since we have the time, and all…”  
  
Mutou nods again, a little too vigorously. “Well, then, if you’ll just follow me… It’s actually back outside. It’s the next building over.”  
  
He holds the door open for me to head out, and the morning sun shines down on me once again, a little bit earlier than expected.  
  
It’s a surprisingly brief walk down a paved path from the main building. I actually hadn’t realized this was a completely separate structure, at first glance. There’s not much distinguishing it from the rest of the Yamaku architecture.  
  
“This is the administrative building,” Mutou explains tiredly. “There’s nothing ‘fun’ about it, but try to keep it in mind, since the nursing staff has their offices here.”  
  
He’s not a good tour guide, but I suppose he doesn’t need to be. Truthfully, I shouldn’t get attached to him, because he’s going to despise me as soon as he discovers how bad at science I am.  
  
As we walk inside, he leads me to a door and loudly raps on it before I get a chance to examine the placard. A muffled voice chimes back from inside, so Mutou pushes the door open and walks inside. I’m not sure what to do, so I stand in the hallway until I’m called in.  
  
“I’ve got that new student here to see you,” Mutou says, brusquely, to a man out of my field of vision.  
  
“Oh, cool. Great timing; I’ve actually got her file in front of me right this minute. Send her in,” a much younger man’s voice says from behind him.  
  
“Send her in…?” Mutou turns around, bewildered, to discover me still standing in the hallway.  
  
“Oh,” he says, walking back in my direction. He gestures to the door with his thumb and forefinger. “Go ahead, this is the Head Nurse. I’ll wait outside until you’re finished.”  
  
He slumps against the wall of the hallway, looking bored, and I nod dumbly and enter the room. It smells faintly of latex and antibacterial soap.  
  
The man in the office chair is surprisingly young-looking, and handsome in a coltish way. He’s got these vivid blue eyes with a lively and sardonic bent to them. It’s a little jarring. I feel cold air on my lower lip and wonder how long they’ve been parted.  
  
“Um, good morning,” I offer weakly.  
  
The Head Nurse grins, and it’s so mirthful that a part of me wonders if I’m at the right school, after all.  
  
“Hi there! Nice to meet you. I’m the Head Nurse, like he said. Feel free to call me ‘Nurse,’ though, everyone does.”  
  
He’s holding his hand out, and I move to shake it, managing to give a firmer handshake this time around.  
  
He leans back into his chair and gestures to an open binder on his desk. “So,” he says nonchalantly, “Iwanako Daidouji. Chronic arrhythmia and a related congenital heart deficiency. Ah, and it looks like you needed a neurothekeoma removed, too.”  
  
He gestures for me to sit down in one of the other chairs. I’m more than happy to do so; hearing about that neurothekeoma is starting to make me feel sick all over again.  
  
I realize he’s been silent for a few seconds. Is he waiting for me to affirm what he said? It’s all in the file, right?  
  
“That’s… that’s correct,” I say, my voice barely greater than a squeak.  
  
He nods. “Right, well, I’m sure you’ll hear all about the school grounds soon enough, so I just want to get you up to speed on a few things.”  
  
He explains to me the medical facilities they have available, and reiterates the 24-hour staff on hand that I think my parents said something about.  
  
Another silence. Those blue eyes are like searchlights, chasing down my own. “Well, that’s very reassuring,” I finally say.  
  
He doesn’t respond right away, and his eyes narrow. I’m not quite sure how to take it. I wasn’t being sarcastic, or anything.  
  
Finally it breaks, and he turns back to the file. “Well, then, it looks like you’ve already got your medications, that’s good. Don’t forget to take those. Other than that, do you partake in any kind of, ah, athletic activity? Maybe…  _naginata-jutsu?_ ”  
  
It’s a joke. I know how to force myself to laugh at a boy’s jokes, so I giggle politely, though I think thus far I’ve been a little too laconic for the gesture to convey any real sense of sincerity.  
  
As for athletic activity… No. I’ve always been terrible at sports. I never liked them, either.  
  
“Definitely not,” I answer.  
  
He nods, as if that was what he was expecting. “Well, at any rate, any kind of concussion to your chest area could be very dangerous to your heart, so I’m going to have to recommend you stay away from any activities like that. For now, anyway.”  
  
He scratches his head, looking pensive. “The previous heart attack wasn’t caused by a concussion to the chest area, was it…? Your file doesn’t say.”  
  
The question feels uncomfortably invasive. I find myself breaking his gaze to stare down at my lap, considering how to handle the question. It’s a crime, how obvious I’m being.  
  
“N, no.”  
  
Another pause, but he leaves me be and looks back in his file. “Well, still, you need to keep your body healthy, so a little exercise will help with that. You got that nasty myxoma excised, so if you had dyspnea problems before, they should be a lot better now.”  
  
I don’t want to hear about  _that_  anymore. It’s horrific.  
  
“Just take it easy for a while,” he continues, “brisk walks, light jogging, that sort of thing. Or you could swim, even. Did Mutou mention the pool here?”  
  
I shake my head. “I don’t know how to swim, though.” And, anyway, there’s that whole swimsuit issue to deal with.  
  
He chuckles. “Don’t worry about it. Just walk around in the shallow end. I wouldn’t want you diving or swimming laps right now, anyway. You shouldn’t overexert yourself.”  
  
I give him a wan smile. “I know.”  
  
His expression gets more serious. “Absolutely no risks. Take care of yourself. And, ah, there’s one more thing.”  
  
He looks a little uncomfortable.  
  
“You know you can’t take oral birth control, right?”  
  
…!  
  
_Did he just_  
  
I stop dead in my tracks, and look up at him, aghast. “Wh, what?”  
  
He holds his hands up in the air, as if to defend himself from a beating. “No, I didn’t mean… I’m just letting you know, with the medications you’re taking, that sort of thing really isn’t an option for you. Even if there weren’t any adverse effects from taking them with your medications, they’d still by their very nature exacerbate your condition, so… just keep in mind that you need to use a different form of—”  
  
I nod vigorously. “I understand.” The easiest way to end this conversation is to acquiesce to everything.  
  
The Nurse sighs, obviously glad he’s gotten through that part. “Good, that’s it then. Come to me if you need anything.”  
  
“Y… yes. I’ll be sure to,” I stammer, standing up from my seat considerably faster than feels natural. Bowing forward politely, I wish him a nice day and exit from his office as quickly as I can without breaking into a run.  
  
I’m starting to feel nauseated. I know he was looking out for my best interests, and that is, after all, why I’m going to school here — but I wish, more than anything, that birth control was a subject he’d elected not to touch upon. That was a lost cause, though; there was never any chance he  _wouldn’t_  mention it. It is, after all, a very significant complication of my condition. One I’ve been aware of for a long time now.  
  
Making love will kill me.  
  
Well, basically.  
  
Oral birth control will kill me. The exertion from lovemaking might kill me, hypothetically. If I were to become pregnant, though… I’d absolutely die.  
  
I learned that two months ago. My cardiologist explained to me that it’s not medically recommended for women with my condition to have children. Even if I somehow made it all the way through pregnancy, I’d have virtually zero chance of surviving the final stages. My heart is just too weak to carry me through it.  
  
Even on the most fundamental level of being a woman, I’m broken. Nonfunctional. Inadequate. The Nurse unintentionally reminded me of that. Forced these thoughts back to the forefront of my consciousness, so that I don’t forget how much of a piece of glass I am.  
  
And now, in this state of mind, I’m expected to introduce myself to the people I’m going to spend the entire year with.  
  
…I already want my mother.  
  
“Are you finished?”  
  
I turn my head and realize Mutou’s still waiting for me out in the hall. Immersed as I was in my own thoughts, I’d forgotten he was there, or even where I was.  
  
I’m in too sour a mood to do anything else than nod. I feel like garbage. Starting the day out by seeing the head nurse was a horrible idea. If my condition is allowed to be the center of attention for even a moment, its gravity swells up and sucks everything into it. I just want to sit down and stare at a wall for a few hours.  
  
“Well,” the teacher says, realizing I don’t have anything else to add, “We should head back to the classroom. Everybody should be waiting.”  
  
I spend the next couple of moments focusing on my own breathing as he opens the exterior door and we exit the building.


	5. New Game Plus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> First impressions are hard. Harder still when one isn't at one's best.
> 
> Sometimes, with some people, it's impossible to succeed.

_Hi, I’m Iwanako Daidouji, and I’m here because I can’t confess to a boy without almost dying from a severe heart attack._  
  
Or how about:  
  
_It’s nice to meet you all; I’m Iwanako Daidouji and this is the greatest catastrophe of my entire life._  
  
No, that’s no good. Maybe this:  
  
_How do you do? I’m Iwanako Daidouji, and I could drop dead any day now, so if you make friends with me, there’s no long-term commitment! I’m also quite talented at ikebana..._  
  
“Er, I’d rather not introduce myself, actually,” I say demurely.  
  
Mutou nods. “I understand; it’s no problem. Well, then, if you’ll just come with me…”  
  
I stare at his back for a moment, sighing quietly, then follow along, retrieving a compact from my bag to contemplate my reflection as we both trudge methodically up the stairs, in my case from my oppressive melancholy, and in his because trudging just seems to be his preferred way of getting someplace.  
  
I just saw my reflection a few minutes ago, but focusing on something other than where I’m going helps me combat my anxieties. Even I can see the exhaustion and sadness in my silver eyes, and I make a few attempts at changing my expression to appear more cool and controlled.  
  
And then I’m struck with a question: What does it matter? Should I even  _care_  about what my classmates are going to see in me? Why? So that I can make a new circle of friends with whom to waste my time gossiping? Except that  _these_  friends are on dialysis or motorized wheelchairs?  _That’s_  going to fill the void my condition left in me?  
  
I don’t have a good answer by the time Mutou begins to open the door to classroom 3-3. I hastily place the compact back in my bag and put my agonizing on hold.  
  
Mutou stares inside the classroom for a moment, regarding it with a bemused expression and checking his watch. “Oh, there’s still ten minutes before class starts,” he says, looking a little surprised. “You can just come in and take a seat until we’re ready to begin, if you’d like.”  
  
He walks towards his desk at the head of the room, and I follow him in. It’s a well-lit room, like most classrooms, and the far wall has two large fenestrated windows with a nice view of the school grounds. Other than the fact that the floor is hardwood paneling instead of linoleum tiles, which is admittedly nice, there’s nothing remarkable or even interesting about the classroom itself.  
  
Most of the desks are still empty. Only five or six students are already in the classroom. “Where should I sit?”  
  
Mutou slackly gestures towards the far wall of the room. “Your desk is in the middle row, right next to the window. Feel free to put your belongings down.”  
  
A window seat… That’s something to be thankful for, at least. I thank him and seat myself at my desk, resting my hands atop my bag. There’s only one student sitting nearby, the girl in the desk in front of me, and she twists around to face me.  
  
“New student, huh?”  
  
I glance upwards, meeting her eyes. “Er… yes,” I say softly. “My name is Iwanako Daidouji.”  
  
She smiles. “I’m Molly Kapur. Welcome to Yamaku.”  
  
Her skin is ecru in color, and from her facial features and name it seems apparent that she’s foreign, ethnically if not nationally. She doesn’t seem to have an accent though. There’s surely a story behind that, but I won’t get to hear it today, if ever.  
  
“Thanks,” I say, smiling back, but I know it doesn’t reach my eyes. I realize suddenly with a bit of a shock that this girl, Molly, is the first person my age I’ve spoken to since… Well, she won’t realize it, but she’s inadvertently etched herself into what is sure to be an auspicious memory of mine.  
  
“First day jitters? You’ve got this faraway look in your eyes…”  
  
“N, nothing like that,” I reply. “It’s just… been a while since I was in a classroom.”  
  
The gravity of what I’m saying only hits me after I finish speaking. I felt like the implication was vague, but her expression softens at my comment and I can see the revelation in her eyes.  
  
“Oh…”  
  
Great.  
  
There’s an awkward pause in the conversation before she continues. “Well—”  
  
_“Woohoo, new student~!”_  
  
A voice like the synthesis of a piccolo and a foghorn. I’m so startled, I nearly jump out of my seat. Reflexively turning to face the owner of the voice, I almost can’t believe what I see.  
  
The girl in front of me, her fists triumphantly on her hips like she’s presiding over some sort of dynastic genocide, has hair as pink as a carnation, styled in large ringlets like a British noblewoman. Before I can even say anything, she suddenly begins gesticulating with her arms so wildly that I flinch from the fear of an assault.  
  
“So you’re really the new student?” The girl says, her hands going every which way as she bellows out the words. “Well, yeah, she must be, right? I guess we weren’t getting a boy after all.”  
  
What? She’s talking to herself?  _What?_  
  
I’m so baffled, so shocked, that I don’t realize I’ve been leaning away from her in horror until the back of my head gently bumps against the far wall. Who is this person…?! Is she crazy? Do I have to sit next to her?  
  
I glance over at Molly, but she’s just giving me a sympathetic expression. She opens her mouth to say something, but it’s immediately drowned out by the human non sequitur standing over me.  
  
“Waha~! Welcome to Yamaku Academy!” Her hands continue to flail wildly. “I’m Misha! We’ll be sitting right next to each other!”  
  
Oh  _god—_  
  
“This is Shicchan, the class representative! She says ‘it’s nice to meet you!’”  
  
She says…?  
  
‘Misha’ shifts slightly and for the first time I notice that she’s standing with another girl, roughly the same height as her (and quite a few centimeters taller than me.) The bespectacled girl has short, dark hair with delicate, almost elfin features. She has an intense, scrutinizing gaze, one that’s hard to ignore; I notice it quickly and covertly falling upon my hair, my makeup, my jewelry… Finally she stops and meets my eyes, shooting me an enigmatic smile.  
  
I am so confused.  
  
“Ah… It’s nice to meet you, too,” I say, for the lack of any better idea. “My name is Iwanako.”  
  
Now it’s this girl’s— ‘Shicchan’s’ turn to flail her hands, and it is only from the diligence with which Misha reads the other girl’s gestures that I'm able to figure out, with my mind addled as it is, that what they're doing is speaking sign language. I didn’t even know we’d  _have_  any deaf students in our class. It would have been courteous for somebody to mention that at some point…  
  
“Good morning, everyone; we’re going to get started,” Mutou says from the front of the room. I had forgotten he was still here. “Today, we have a new student.”  
  
He turns to make eye contact with me. “Would you please come to the front for a moment?”  
  
Oh, right, I’d forgotten about the class introduction. Showtime, I suppose. Nodding respectfully, I stand up and begin to head over to the teacher’s desk. I brush past Misha as I walk– she smells as pink as she looks, like a freshly opened pack of bubblegum.  
  
I take my place standing awkwardly next to Mutou. From the front of the room, I realize that the entire classroom has filled up while I was struggling through the encounter with the apparent class representative and her pink friend. There’s not even twenty students in the classroom, but all their eyes are upon me, and the attention makes me feel extremely uncomfortable. That’s a new development; I would have felt shy, but not uncomfortable, prior to my experience in the hospital.  
  
Determined not to shrivel under the spotlight, I try to distract myself by glancing over some of my new classmates, just as they’re glancing over me. To my relief, and mild surprise, they don’t look too different from my old class. It was probably silly of me to have gotten myself worked up over the prospect of girls missing their faces. No dialysis machines either, thankfully. Not even a wheelchair.  
  
At first I feel a sense of incredulity that any of these students actually have anything wrong with them, other than Shicchan, but then I notice a dusky-skinned girl in the front row missing her left hand. No, these students have problems like mine, but they’re more subtle than I expected.  
  
Am I as subtle as they are? I suppose I must be; my scar is completely concealed, but it doesn’t feel that way at all. I feel like my infirmity radiates off of me like a beacon.  
  
Absurdly, as my gaze drifts across the students in the back row, one of them, a tall, dark-haired girl, covers her face with her hands, ostensibly to prevent me from looking at her. Silly as that is, I can’t help but relate—somehow it’s like looking into a very skittish mirror.  
  
As I look away from her, I can’t help but notice that some of the boys in the center row are leering at me. A sandy-haired guy in the center row, particularly, with an ugly hat and a bandage on his ear. The way he seems to be undressing me with his eyes makes me feel even more uncomfortable than before, and I quickly decide I’m done visually appraising my classmates. I shouldn’t even have started.  
  
Mutou has been trailing on, talking a lot but ultimately saying very little. “Please welcome our newest classmate,” he finally says, clapping his hands. The rest of the class follows along and I feel a rush of embarrassment at the gesture.  
  
_Why are you applauding me?_  I want to ask.  _Don’t applaud me. I’m not going to do anything worthy of it._  
  
After the clapping subsides, silence washes over the room, and everybody seems to be waiting for somebody to do something.  
  
I realize all the eyes are still on me. What, they were actually expecting me to give an introduction? I told Mutou I didn’t want to give one, and I truly don’t, but I feel a voiceless sense of peer pressure, and finally crumple against it.  
  
“Ah, I’m… Iwanako Daidouji,” I offer, weakly.  
  
The class begins to look at me in apparent consternation, and for a moment I don’t know what I did wrong.  
  
“You’ll want to speak up a bit,” the teacher offers.  
  
I can feel myself redden. It’s been so long since I’ve had to speak to a whole room like this that I’ve forgotten how my own voice sounds. I was always soft-spoken; more so now, after four months of not having much to say.  
  
“Iwanako Daidouji,” I say, speaking louder. My voice sounds squeaky and shaky to me, but at least it’s audible. “I’m from Shibuya.”  
  
I decide to leave it at that. I don’t know what else there is to be said.  
  
More silence; I’m getting a lot of blank, glassy-eyed expressions. Some people are giving me puzzled looks. One girl in the front row is literally asleep.  
  
Perhaps there’s still time for me to track Mother down and head back to Tokyo with her? This was a nice little experiment.  
  
Mutou, quickly realizing I’m not an especially loquacious girl, finally picks up from there and speaks a handful of platitudes about being welcoming and getting along. The students glance back to him and I notice Misha continuing to speak sign language in the middle row. I still don’t know what to think of her. Well, frankly I think she’s insane, but hopefully she’s something other than  _that._  
  
As I’m pondering if her strange hairstyle isn’t some regrettable new fashion trend I missed during my long hospitalization, Mutou finishes speaking and the classroom starts applauding again.  
  
I really don’t care for it.  _Quit it,_  is what I’d say, if I had no self-control and wanted to push away the entire class on the first day of school.  
  
Mutou turns to me, and the other students, realizing he’s not addressing them for a moment, go back to engaging each other in a low, ambient hum of conversation.  
“Today we’re doing some group work, so you’ll have an opportunity to talk to some of the other students. Is that alright?”  
  
“Uh… sure,” I stammer.  
  
“You can go ahead and work with Hakamichi, the class representative. Shizune Hakamichi. You already met her, I believe. She can help you get up to speed on the coursework. And feel free to ask her any questions you might have about the school. Who else would be able to do that better, right?”  
  
…Actually, I was the class rep our first year, but it’s not an experience I’d want to repeat. I can’t remember... How did I even get that position? I don’t think it made me any more of an expert on the school than anybody else, but there’s no point to arguing this.  
  
In fact, Mutou has already walked away. Misha waves me back over as I sigh resignedly and return to my seat.  
  
Her enormous gold eyes peer at me. For some reason, she reminds me of a tanuki.  
  
“So… I guess we’re going to work together,” I say, finally.  
  
“We sure are~! I’m really excited!” She practically shouts when she speaks, and this time I really  _do_  jump. Her voice is so loud that, by comparison, I’m not even sure if I’ve said anything yet. Her face breaks out into a grin and, inexplicably, the sight of her cheerful expression is almost suffocating.  
  
The two girls start signing something to each other, and I stare at them curiously. Though neither of them is actually speaking, I feel like I can’t get a word in edgewise. For her part, Molly has already turned to work with the other two students in the row ahead of us, and I can’t seem to get her attention.  
  
“…Misha?”  
  
She stops signing for a moment and turns to me. “Mm-hmm?”  
  
“Shizune… is… deaf? And you translate?”  
  
Misha’s signing as I speak and I realize that my question is answered before I even finish asking it. A part of me feels a sudden pang of regret at the insensitivity of the question, but if  _these_  two are about to chastise me for an absence of tact, that’s quite a double-standard.  
  
Misha just keeps grinning, though. “Of course, Iwacchan! Why do you think we’re signing to each other? Were you confused? I’m sorry! Wahaha~!”  
  
Her laughter is like wind chimes flying through a plate glass window. I just can’t get over how much energy she seems to have.  
  
Shizune, for her part, just regards me with a blank expression. I have no idea what she thinks about me, but I’m inclined to think she’s not as thrilled with me as Misha is.  
  
Hey, wait. “Did you call me Iwacchan?”  
  
Misha nods emphatically. “Sure, why not? You seem like a Iwacchan to me!”  
  
I sigh again. Iwacchan... I’m not fond of that nickname, but if it makes Misha happy it’s not worth it to press the issue. As long as it doesn’t catch on with anybody else, I don’t care.  
  
Suddenly Mutou comes around to place the assignments on our desks, and as I gingerly pick mine up to inspect it, I’m temporarily distracted from my two new keepers by the dawning realization that I know absolutely nothing about any of the material in this assignment. I can’t even remember what some of the  _words_  mean.  
  
I glance at Hakamichi to say something about it, but she and Misha are again preoccupied speaking to each other. I try to refocus on pondering the assignment, but there’s something eye-catching about the frantic, somatic conversation my new classmates are having, and I begin to stare.  
  
I’ve only ever met a deaf person one other time in my life. It was about a year and a half ago. I was at the train station, getting Lipovitan from a machine, when a stocky, middle-aged salaryman walked up to me and waved a 5000-yen note in my face. I couldn’t figure out what he was asking me for, and he only answered my questions with a disquieting groaning sound, so, vexed, I turned away briskly and darted off. It was only later, as I was boarding the train, that I realized that he was just a deaf man asking me for change. I felt pretty bad about that for a while.  
  
Maybe I should have anticipated that I’d have deaf classmates. I probably could have learned at least the basic greetings in sign before coming here…But I guess it doesn’t really matter if Misha’s always going to translate.  
  
“Hakamichi,” I say, interrupting their voiceless conversation, “I’m not familiar with any of this content.” I hold up the paper in my hand for emphasis. “I don’t think I’m going to be much help on this assignment.”  
  
The two girls briefly stop signing for a moment to regard me curiously. There’s something in the class rep’s eyes that makes me wary, but then she smiles confidently and begins signing rapidly. Misha just grins again.  
  
“Haha~! You shouldn’t get worked up over  _that_ , Iwacchan! It’s your first day!” she chirps. “You’ll have plenty of time to study later. Today, just worry about getting used to the school! Shicchan says you should ask her any questions you have.”  
  
Hakamichi just smiles at me. There’s a sort of serene fierceness in it, but then it slackens and she continues to sign.  
  
“So how do you like the school so far? Have you gotten a chance to look around much yet?”  
  
“Uh…”  
  
To be honest, I haven’t formed much of an opinion. I guess I could have taken more time to stop and smell the proverbial roses, but I’ve just been so self-involved… The school itself didn’t matter, so much as that it was  _new_  and it was  _mine_. Now that I’m  _actually_  sitting at a desk in a classroom, speaking to my new classmates, it’s strange to be focusing on  _reality_  and not just nebulous ideas.  
  
“It’s… nice. It’s different.”  
  
“Hahaha~! Nothing like Shibuya, huh?”  
  
“I went to school further away, but no, it’s nothing like there, either.”  
  
Misha just giggles. Hakamichi regards me with a curious expression. There really is something about her gaze that feels as though it’s coming from behind a one-way mirror.  
  
Actually, I don’t want to talk about the past anymore. “So, ah, the assignment?”  
  
“Oh, right! We need to do that! Especially because you said you needed help with it…”  
  
Hakamichi signs something, and Misha nods. “Shicchan says ‘don’t worry, we’ll still get this finished before the end of class.’ So just try to help out wherever!”  
  
“Thanks, class rep.”  
  
“Waha~! Iwacchan, there’s no need to be so formal! Just call her ‘Shicchan!’”  
  
Really? I glance over to Hakamichi, but her expression is too vague to read. Then she rolls her eyes and signs to Misha.  
  
“…Oh. Or ‘Shizune’ is fine too, she says.”  
  
I nod, and the three of us get to work. Or, I should say, the two of them get to work, while I frantically flip through the textbook in a halfhearted and vain effort to get some kind of grasp on the knowledge base I’m apparently supposed to have to do this assignment.  
  
Shizune and Misha were nonchalant about my warning that I was completely inept at this subject, but after twenty minutes the full extent of my uselessness seems to dawn on them, and Shizune occasionally glances my way with a nonplussed expression.  
  
_Sorry, I’m not actually as indolent as you probably think I am_ , is what I would say to her, if I knew how to sign.  
  
For his part, Mutou doesn’t seem to realize I’m sitting here like a fool, not doing anything. I suppose I could flag him over and tell him that I need additional instruction, but for some reason that feels like it would be disrespectful to Shizune and Misha. At the same time, I don’t feel right asking  _them_  to drop what they’re doing and get me up to speed, either.  
  
And, on some level, I realize these are just excuses to cover the fact that on some level, I just don’t care.  
  
Another ten minutes into the assignment, Shizune looks me in the eyes and pushes her glasses to the bridge of her nose. Her eyes are a deep, dark, blue, and something about them reminds me of my father, actually, whenever I disappointed him as a child.  
  
She signs to me and the words come out of Misha’s mouth. “Iwacchan, what do  _you_  think?”  
  
I blink at Shizune. “Beg your pardon?”  
  
“About the problem.”  
  
I blink again, and stare down at the assignment. “The problem… Er, this problem here?”  
  
Shizune furrows her brow and signs at me more… kinetically, for the lack of a better word, then she points at a portion of the page.  
  
“No, Iwacchan, we solved that problem already. We’re on  _this_  one now. You need to pay attention!” Misha’s amused voice doesn’t transmit Shizune’s annoyance, but I can figure it out easily enough.  
  
Feeling the color rising to my cheeks, I glance back at Shizune. “I… I’m sorry, I said I wasn’t good at this subject, and I was trying to catch up…”  
  
“No excuses, Iwacchan! I can’t know you need help unless you  _say_  something! We could have walked you through the problems, we could have asked Mutou over to help you, anything would be better than you just sitting there like a lump! You’ve been staring at the same page of that textbook for half an hour! What? Really, Shicchan? I thought we said it wasn’t a big deal?”  
  
They start to proceed into another silent conversation, but I interject. “I’m sorry… I guess I’m just a little overwhelmed with everything, still…”  
  
Misha translates my words and Shizune rolls her eyes. “Forget… Don’t worry about it, Iwacchan. We’re almost done with the assignment anyway! Just make sure you’re ready tomorrow!”  
  
Misha smiles at me, not the manic grin she was giving me before but a softer smile, seemingly intended to reassure me. Shizune, for her part, isn’t even looking at me anymore, focused on the remainder of the assignment.  
  
I return to staring at the textbook, but after a few minutes I look up and realize they’ve finished all the exercises. I contributed absolutely nothing. I was just a hanger-on.  
  
Despite my indignation, I feel a sense of shame, which only worsens when Shizune shoots me an unmistakable glare. She doesn’t say anything, though, and turns away, leaving me feeling as though I’ve failed some sort of test. I stare at the back of her head for a moment, speechless.  
  
And yet, I feel pretty annoyed with Hakamichi, too. I  _told_  her that I wasn’t going to be any help, and  _she_  said that wasn’t a problem, but after seeing me unwilling to fully dedicate myself to the assignment a few hours into my first day, whatever enthusiasm she might have had about a having a new classmate seems to have quickly petered out. What would she have had me do?  
  
What a joke... Not even a few hours into Day One, and I’ve already succeeded in alienating one of my classmates, though apparently she alienates quite easily. At least Misha, for her part, seems peacefully oblivious to Shizune’s stern disapproval of me, though I’m not sure how much of a consolation that is.  
  
I’m still contemplating what on earth just happened when the clock tower bells start to ring, indicating the end of class. Shizune wastes no time in moving toward the door, but Misha smiles and beckons me to follow. I guess it’s time to eat, though food is the last thing on my mind right now.


	6. Breaking the Loop

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's better than being OUT of the loop, anyway.
> 
> Not by much, mind.

Lunchtime passed very uneventfully. I wasn’t very hungry; despite a prodigious selection of foods available, I decided to save my adventuring for another day and settled for a cup of weak tea and a boiled egg. It’s possible the medications are interfering with my appetite, but for once the more rational answer is that I’m simply a little stressed.  
  
At Misha’s insistence, I agreed to pass the hour sitting with her and Shizune, but after I told them I didn’t have any questions for the class representative, the two of them spent the rest of the time speaking to each other in sign. Silently.  
  
There’s something... off about these two, though I can’t quite place what it is exactly. The fact that the three of us are alone in this part of the cafeteria strikes me as especially peculiar. Don’t they have other friends? Where are they, if not here? I can see a scattered few other conversations in sign language at other lunch tables, so it isn’t as though Misha is the only person Hakamichi can speak to.  
  
The impression that I’m getting is that Shizune is either highly misanthropic or otherwise not well-liked. Or maybe it’s Misha that’s the problem, though she doesn’t strike me as offensive; ostentatious and inscrutable, certainly, but otherwise harmless.  
  
If they looked like they were very interested in befriending me, I might be concerned that they would cut me off from forming other relationships, but they hardly seem to notice I’m here. Misha occasionally turns to smile at me, but Hakamichi hasn’t even looked at me. Maybe their conversation is absolutely riveting, but I refuse to go along with it any further. I’m done eating, anyway.  
  
“Shizune, Misha,” I say, bowing my head slightly in gratitude, “thank you for showing me the cafeteria. I’ll see you back in the classroom.”  
  
Misha blinks, seemingly ruffled, before her smile returns. “Oh, no problem, Iwacchan~! Feel free to ask if you want to know where anything else is!”  
  
They’re her words, not Hakamichi’s, because the latter merely waves me a nonchalant goodbye.  
  
“I will. See you in a bit.”  
  
I’m delighted to escape the cafeteria, especially since today I’m still wearing the uniform from my old school and I stick out like an erupting volcano. Dozens of students have shot me glances since I walked in and the attention was getting to be a little much. Nobody came up to me, though, for introductions or anything. Either people at this school aren’t very proactive, or Shizune’s dampening presence is just that powerful.  
  
Our classroom is almost empty when I walk back in, but the dark-haired girl in the back row is sitting quietly at her desk. Her hair falls like velvet curtains down the sides of her head and onto the desk surface, almost completely obscuring the book she’s reading.  
  
She’s almost like a tableau. For some reason it feels subversive even to acknowledge her existence, but I decide to greet her anyway.  
  
“Good afternoon,” I say, lightly, crossing the room.  
  
The girl shoots up like a piston, gasping, hair flying everywhere. Her dark eyes briefly touch upon mine before vanishing back into her hair.  
  
“G, good aftern-noon.”  
  
Her voice is even softer than mine, and there’s a hint of a panic in it. What on earth...  
  
“Sorry... I didn’t mean to scare you,” I say, more confused than apologetic.  
  
The girl mumbles noncommittally and sinks back into her seat, returning to her original posture like a ruffled dove taking over a newly abandoned park bench. As I return to my seat, I’m tempted to check my reflection to see if I’ve somehow turned into some kind of terrifying predator between leaving the cafeteria and entering the classroom. Scary isn’t an adjective I’m often graced with.  
  
It isn’t long— unfortunately— before Shizune and Misha return as well, and their brisk movements are enough of a perturbation that the purple-haired girl again seems visibly intimidated. I can’t imagine what would make a person so jumpy. She makes  _me_ look outgoing.  
  
For their part, Shizune and Misha seem to continue their conversation from downstairs, leaving me be. I pass the time staring out the window while the remaining students slowly file into the classroom, burying themselves in their own conversations waiting for our afternoon teacher to come in and resume our lessons.  
  
I’m glancing back over our classroom when the door opens and Molly walks back into the room. I look over to her passively, only to double-take when I realize she’s walking on prosthetic legs. In fact, she doesn’t even have real knees... Despite that, her gait is perfectly effective, albeit unnatural.  
  
How did I fail to notice before? She was sitting right in front of me...  
  
Molly meets my eyes and gives a wan smile, and I realize I’ve been gawking. Embarrassed, I turn back to the window, hiding the heat rising to my face.  
  
For a few hours, I’d actually forgotten that this was a school for the physically disabled. This is actually a pretty odd and noteworthy place, but I’ve been too distracted to take it all in.  
  
I can’t help but be conscious of how my nebulous first impression of Molly changed as soon as I saw her prosthetics. Well, it didn’t _change_ , but now I have two  _different_  impressions, and for some reason they’re irreconcilable. Is the one I had when we spoke this morning the “truer” one? Should I pretend I still don’t know about her prosthetic legs?  
  
“Hey, how are you doing?”  
  
She’s standing in front of her desk, facing me, leaning her right shoulder relaxedly against the wall. I remember that she’s almost certainly figured out I was recently hospitalized based on our earlier conversation.  
  
I give her what is surely a weary-looking smile. “I’ve been worse,” I sigh. “Thanks for asking.”  
  
She peers at me curiously. “Is it the first time you’ve been this far from home? I mean, by yourself?”  
  
“I guess you could say that, after a fashion. I’ve lived in Tokyo my whole life.”  
  
She nods. “Oh, cool. I’m from Kobe. Same deal.”  
  
I blink at her. “Your whole life?”  
  
She nods, finally moving to take her seat. “More or less, until I graduated middle school. Been here since then.”  
  
That explains why she doesn’t have an accent. Well, she has a bit of a Kansai accent, actually, now that I think about it. I’m actually finding the conversation a good distraction from my thoughts, but the teacher coming in and starting class puts it on hold.  
  
Hearing the teacher drone on about uninteresting subjects makes me realize how tired I am. I’ve spent the last four months in a sedentary existence. Even simply sitting upright in a desk and giving someone my full attention is a taxing experience.  
  
Eventually the final bell tolls, liberating me from my chair. Shizune stands up and moves for the door before I’ve even put my pen down. Misha follows along diligently, waving at me when I glance up at them.  
  
“Bye, Iwacchan~! See you tomorrow morning!”  
  
I halfheartedly wave back at her. I really don’t know what’s going on with those two. Sighing, I gather my belongings together and stand up from my desk, though I suddenly realize I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do from here.  
  
“Molly,” I say, addressing her as she gets to her feet, “Are you going back to the dorms?”  
  
“Um… not right this minute,” she says pensively.  
  
“Oh, so you’re in a club or something?”  
  
“Er… No, I’m not in a club or anything… It’s complicated,” she says, tugging anxiously on one of her braids. “Sorry, did you need me to help you find them? It’s kind of a no-brainer: when you go out the way you came, look where the stream of people are going and you should see it okay. Trust me, you can’t miss it.”  
  
“…I see,” I mumble, a bit surprised at her sudden evasiveness. “Well, see you tomorrow, I guess.”  
  
“Yeah, we’ll chat! I have to go, though.”  
  
Moving surprisingly fast for not having legs, she grabs her bag and speed-walks out the door.  
  
...Well, that was certainly a little odd. Would it be overstepping my bounds to ask her about it tomorrow morning? If I even get a chance… Shizune and Misha seem to monopolize a lot of my attention considering their questionable amount affection for me. Maybe they just feel responsible for me, because I’m a transfer student.  
  
Well, there’s no point to staying here. I don’t have anywhere to be, either. I pick up my bag and head for the dorms.  
  
It’s just like Molly said; there are students walking to the dorms, and it’s not far off, either. It’s quite a bit warmer than it was this morning, and the air smells nice. After spending as much time as I did breathing nothing but recycled air, this is a refreshing change.  
  
I’m almost tempted to slacken my pace a little and enjoy nature for a change, but the throng of students is staring quizzically at my black-and-burgundy school uniform. It’s a stark contrast from the sea of white and forest green I’m walking in. My mother should have acquired my Yamaku school uniforms while I was in class, so this won’t be a problem from tomorrow on, but for now I’d rather avoid the stares as much as possible.  
  
The dorm looks nice from the outside, its architectural style well complemented by the landscaping around it. What would that be called? Neoclassical? Are there neoclassical buildings in Japan? …Anyway, it looks promising.  
  
The inside is clean and white, but sterile and institutional. There hasn’t been a lot of effort to make it look like anyone’s home, really. I suppose it’s analogous to a hotel hallway. Those aren’t very interesting either.  
  
My room number is 314… I should be able to find that without too much trouble. I walk past the common room as I head for the stairs; a clique of underclassmen girls is in there sitting among a circle of couches, emphatically gossiping about some mutual acquaintance not present. A few of them glance at me suspiciously as I walk past the door, so I hurry along. The chatter is asinine anyway.  
  
Upsettingly, my room is on the fourth story. I climb three flights of stairs, exiting into a long hallway that breaks off into several smaller hallways, like the prongs of a fork. Seems like a good way to keep students organized.  
  
It’s easy enough to locate my hallway, not far from the stairs. Apparently each smaller hallway has four rooms, with a restroom and shower at the end. Hopefully that means I won’t have to duel anybody for the shower in the mornings.  
  
As I pass by the first pair of rooms to reach my own in the back, I suddenly hear a deep, obstreperous groaning coming from the room to my left. It makes me stop in my tracks, turning suspiciously towards the closed door. What was... It almost sounded like...  
  
 _“Woof!”_  
  
...Woof? What, like...? No, there’s no way...  
  
 _“Woof!!”_  
  
That is definitely a dog. There is a dog in that room.   
  
 _“Woof, woof!”_  
  
There. Is a  _dog._  In that room.  
  
Suddenly the door swings open.   
  
“My dog can read minds, you know. He knows you’re thinking evil thoughts.”  
  
...What.  
  
I stand there, gaping, utterly nonplussed. There’s a tall girl leaning in the doorframe, staring annoyedly at me from behind an oval-framed pair of sunglasses with a tint such a deep shade of crimson that they’d be completely impractical for anything. Her long hair is dyed the same completely unnatural scarlet, and the expensive-looking silk bathrobe she’s wearing highlights her precociously top-heavy frame. I almost worry she’s going to fall on me.  
  
Resting on its haunches beside her is a large, liver-colored German Shepherd. It’s eyeing me with a mix of suspicion and eagerness.  
  
“Well?” Her voice is a slightly nasal soprano, so breathy she almost sounds like she’s purring. Is she doing that on purpose? “I  _know_  you’re standing there. I can smell your perfume.  _Why_  are you stalking around my _room?_ ”  
  
She _knows_  I’m standing there? Isn’t that obvious? Is she... Oh, no... This girl’s blind, isn’t she?  
  
“I, er,” I stammer nervously, “I wasn’t  _stalking._  I’m a new student. I was just going to my room.”  
  
She quirks an eyebrow at me, and then gives an amused half-smile.  _“Ah._ Well then, I apologize. The dog can’t  _actually_  read minds. It’s just something I  _say.”_  
  
“That’s... good?”  
  
Smirking now, she gives me a small bow. “I suppose we’ll be neighbors then. I _knew_  having a whole hall to myself was too good to last...”  
  
Is she... blaming me for that? Or is she just being excessively frank?  
  
Not knowing what else to do, I default to my manners. “I, ah, I’m Iwanako Daidouji. It’s nice to meet you...”  
  
“Momomi Matsumoto. Charmed. And  _this_ handsome beast–” she says, gently caressing the side of the dog with the outside of her left leg, “–is my guide dog, Susano’o. _You_  must not be allergic, or you wouldn’t have been assigned this hallway...”  
  
“Susano’o?”  
  
“Sadly, I didn’t get the luxury of naming him,” she sighs irritably. “The trainer was an  _eccentric.”_  
  
“Um... Okay,” I say, flatly. “So... you have a guide dog? So... you’re blind?”   
  
I already know the answer, of course, but for whatever reason I’d like the comforts of external confirmation. Maybe she’s not completely blind? Or can only see movement?   
  
“I should  _hope_  that would be obvious... Unless  _you’re_ blind, too? Hm, I didn’t see you in class today... Well, I wouldn’t one way or the other...”  
  
“N, no,” I answer, embarrassed. “I’m in class 3-3...”  
  
I’m starting to feel a bit uncomfortable speaking to this girl. She seems... derisive. And maybe a little aggressive.  
  
“Hakamichi’s class? You _poor thing.”_  
  
I don’t get a chance to appreciate the weight of that statement before she bends down, reaching out and placing her right hand atop my head.  
  
“My, so  _short._ And your hair is  _lovely,”_  she says, fondling my scalp with her fingertips. “I can _tell_ you’re pretty...”  
  
She’s now making me  _immensely_ uncomfortable, and the fact that bending down makes her ponderous breasts hover inches away from my face only multiplies the effect. As unlikely as it seems that somebody would act so brazenly on first meeting, she almost seems to be making me flustered for her own entertainment.  
  
Still smiling, “So... what characters does your name use, Iwanako?”  
  
I hesitate a little before answering, trying to discern how best to flee this conversation. “Err...  _Gan_  as in rock,  _Gyo_  as in fish; you know the rest.”  
  
She grins impishly. “Mind if I call you ‘Rocky’? I think it’s cute.”  
  
“That... that doesn’t sound anything like my name,” I protest.   
  
“Feh, who cares? Does it have to?” She crosses her arms, raising an eyebrow at me challengingly, as if to say  _‘Isn’t my nickname good enough for you?’_  
  
“N... No, I guess.”  
  
I never would have thought I’d be so easily browbeaten by a blind girl.  
  
Seemingly satisfied, she grins again, as Susano’o yawns and sinks onto the floor. “Great! Well,  _Rocky,_  I look forward to speaking with you some more, but I’m waiting on a call from my boyfriend, so we’ll chat later, hmm?”  
  
“Um, bye, then...”  
  
“Goood even-ing,” she says in a singsong voice. “Avoid the harpies downstairs.”   
  
 _“Woof!”_  
  
With that, she promptly closes the door.   
  
I’m... lost. Was she teasing me, or is she just  _that_ weird? I would have thought the former, but... That hair color and those glasses... I’m not sure what to think. I’ll worry about it later, though. For now, I just want to lie down. I insert my key into room 314 and open the door.  
  
…  
  
For a moment, I’m puzzled by what I see, but then clarity hits.  _You didn’t have to do this,_  I want to say.  
  
Mother didn’t just bring in my belongings; she actually  _decorated_ my room. The entire wall behind the bed is adorned with a massive poster of the Tokyo skyline at night, and the grey, low-maintenance carpet is covered up by a fluffy, brightly-colored rug. Even the white linens standard with these rooms are obfuscated by a satin duvet cover. A old family photo with my parents and brother stands on the desk against the far wall.  
  
This was meant as a surprise. I didn’t see her buy any of these things when we went out shopping. Mother must have had them hidden in the car and gone back for them after dropping off my bags.  
  
There’s a note on the nighttable; I immediately recognize her lackadaisical handwriting.   
  
 _To my perfect daughter—_  
I hope you like the room! It was so  dreary when we saw it last weekend and you deserve better. Please think about your father and I whenever you’re in here. We just want you to be happy. We love you more than you could ever imagine.  
P.S. I bought you some topsoil and flowerpots, etc for the windowsill. Sorry I forgot to water your plants at home.  
P.P.S. They told me they were out of uniforms in your size. Said they would place an order, but just wear your old one for now. Sorry. Take your meds!  
  
Before I finish reading the note, the tears are sliding down my face. Suddenly feeling bereft of energy, I have to fall onto the bed.  
  
My mother is a kind person but she never acted like this before I collapsed in the snow. She and my father were always more concerned with my older brother. It’s only now, as I’ve been wrecked by this condition, that she’s refocused on me, and though the love I feel from her makes me better than I ever would have guessed, it also... makes me hurt inside. A normal girl my age shouldn’t have to lean on their mother so much for spiritual support. Her mother shouldn’t have to buy her a mass of expensive clothing and jewelry just to keep her from plunging into despair.  
  
Mother shouldn’t feel like the only friend in the world I have, anymore. Making her sad shouldn’t be the only reason I would feel guilty if I died the day after tomorrow. She shouldn’t have to be my lifeline.  
  
It... I don’t know. I don’t know why I’m here. I still feel hollow, like I don’t have a future. And Yamaku Academy, at the end of the day, is just a high school. It can’t give me meaning. It can’t promise me anything but a diploma. And then what?  
  
 _“You're going to live a long time, provided you don't lie around_ sulking.”  
  
That’s what the doctor said, the day before yesterday. But what’s the alternative? What am I supposed to do?   
  
...Pragmatically speaking, it probably isn’t even appropriate for me to ask such meaningful questions when I’m still mired in such a toxic state of mind. Maybe the reason I’m here is to distract myself until I forget about my problems? The students I’ve met today are certainly distracting, to say the least.  
  
I don’t have a better solution, so I guess that’s as good as any.  
  
I turn to the night table. My nightly medications are already arranged in a 7-day container, so I swallow them down unceremoniously, then undress and hang up my uniform in the closet. I grimace as I suddenly remember what my mom wrote in the note about school uniforms.  
  
Well, great, I guess. I get to be the one girl in the whole school wearing a different uniform. A special snowflake among special snowflakes.   
  
...I try to be upset, but I can’t help but smile sardonically as I slip on my nightgown.  _It figures._  
  
And, on that thought, I bury myself under the covers of my bed and let my consciousness slip away.


	7. Grazing with the Herd

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another day at school...
> 
> It's too much to ask for it to be a carefree one.

Quarter to six…  
  
Queer dreams. Dreamt I was turned into a computer program and made to sing songs for people sitting in small, humid rooms. Also everybody lived in the everglades? I don’t even know…  
  
I feel like a corpse… Waking up at this time used to be second nature. Now it’s a _crime_ against nature.  
  
Tumbling unceremoniously out of bed, I gingerly stand up and stretch my arms, yawning so widely that the corners of my lips ache, and then I pull a fluffy pink towel from the top shelf of my closet and drift towards the showers. The water is mercifully hot, and I probably spend ten to fifteen minutes just standing there, soaking, like uncooked pasta waiting to soften, before shampooing my hair with the premium bathing products my mother purchased for me. This is the first time I’ve used them; they’re violet-scented, just like my perfume. I dry off, spending another ten minutes blow-drying my hair, and skulk back to my room to get dressed for the day.  
  
My old, reliable school uniform comes on almost effortlessly, though later on I’m going to want to get it starched and pressed. I put on my jewelry—earrings, bracelet, claddagh ring—then slip on my black ballet flats, walking over to the mirror to apply my makeup—nothing outrageous, just foundation, mascara, and lip gloss. I fret a little over my hair, wondering what I’m going to do with it today, before deciding on a same-side lace braid that takes three tries to get right, but looks good enough to justify the effort. As a final touch, I splash myself lightly with perfume, though my school uniform already smells of it, and check my reflection one last time before deciding I’m satisfied.  
  
Then I have to frown.  _Why am I doing this? Who is this for?_  
  
Once, I might have said “for my mother”. She’s always been my role model, though I could never be as vivacious as she is. More recently, I might have said—privately—“for Hisao”.   
  
In those days, before my world ended, I wanted nothing more than for Hisao to notice me. Even before I found the courage inside myself to confess my feelings for him, feelings I had kept inside for months prior to that day in the snow, if he would just smile at me, if he’d just say “Good morning, Iwanako”, when I walked into homeroom, it was… that was enough.  
  
It sounds ridiculous in hindsight, but we never really spoke to each other. I was much too shy to engage him in conversation, especially with him always surrounded by his friends. If it hadn’t been for the encouragement of one of our mutual friends, Mai, I might never have had the strength of will to write him that letter. And then… what? Would I still be there right now, waiting for my ruined heart to go off like a ticking time bomb? Still sitting in class, hoping he’d smile to me as he walked by? I don’t know. Probably.  
  
I suppose I still fret over my appearance, even though I seem to be somewhat overdressed compared to my classmates, for  _myself_ , now. Boys and confessions in the snow are a thing of the past; it’s just me now, and I don’t want to look as pathetic and lonely as I usually feel.

Or maybe that's a flimsy justification for barefaced narcissism. Lord knows it wouldn't make me all that different from the _rest_ of my family.  
  
I take my morning dose of medication, washing it down with a swig of Lipovitan. (I probably shouldn’t do that, but… nobody said I couldn’t.) I’m about to walk to class when I notice a piece of cloth on the floor by my closet; it must have fallen from the top shelf when I took a towel.  
  
I bend down to inspect it; I’ve never seen it before. Then I realize, to my surprise, that it’s a new bathing suit. Yet another vaguely umbilical gift from my mother. It’s a sleek one-piece, high-necked, with a deep plunge in the back. Mostly black, but with a pink stripe above the bust. Practical yet still a little girly. More importantly, it’s ideal for covering up my scar without making me look like an aquatic nun.  
  
She must have known about the pool here and wanted me to use it… I should at least check it out. Not like I have any other plans for today.

* * *

The cafeteria has some rice balls with seasoned nori that are wholly inoffensive, so I help myself to a couple before class. I don’t see anyone I know, so, after washing them down with the last of my energy drink, I make my way to the classroom. I’m still getting stares from people, on account of my uniform, but at least I know I look my best. I try to force myself to stand a little straighter, to ignore the other students, but it’s surprising; you’d think most of them would know better than to gape at people.  
  
Shizune and Misha are already there when I walk in to take my seat. They’re in the middle of a conversation, but Misha turns to me happily as I sit down.  
  
“Good morning, Iwacchan~!”  
  
“Good morning, Misha,” I say, giving her a tired smile. She’s as loud as ever, but it’s kind of nice to be greeted so enthusiastically. She goes back to focusing on Shizune, though, who merely nods at me in passing.  
  
Molly shows up a few minutes later, accompanied by a few classmates I haven’t formally met yet. We exchange greetings as she takes her seat.  
  
I’m reminded again of her hasty departure yesterday afternoon, and I’m mulling over the best way to ask her about it when Mutou finally enters the room and starts class, handing out the morning’s assignments. Another group activity, like yesterday.  
  
Am I going to work with Shizune and Misha again? I turn to them, but Misha’s has her back to me and Shizune seems to be avoiding my gaze.  
  
I don’t get a word in before Mutou returns to the teacher’s desk and gestures over to me. “Ah, Daidouji, would you come over here for a moment?”  
  
I look up at him, curiously, before nodding and doing as he says. What could this be about? The other students are mostly chatting amongst themselves, but now a few of them are glancing over at me curiously. Apparently conscious of this, he speaks in a low voice.  
  
“What did you think of yesterday’s assignment?”  
  
I blink, surprised at the unexpected question. “I’m sorry?”  
  
“Was it too difficult? Too easy?”  
  
I don’t know what to say for a moment, until I notice Shizune in my peripheral vision, staring at us intently, and I instantly know what this is all about.  _Drat_.  
  
At some point, the class rep tattled on me, taking her troubles about my lackluster performance yesterday directly to Mutou. Perhaps she spoke to him as early as after lunch. Now, he’s concerned.  
  
I might have had this subject under control in a few days under my own power, or I might not have, but it was pretty bold of Hakamichi to take matters into her own hands without consulting me. I almost shoot her a dirty look, but I stop myself at the last minute and glare at a pencil case instead.  
  
“Err, I don’t know that it was  _hard_ ,” I say, my small voice delicately holding back a storm of emotion, “but I’m a little out of practice, I think. This was never my strongest subject…”  
  
Mutou nods, as though that was the answer he was expecting.  
  
“You may have missed a lot of important material,” he sighs. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to assist you with today’s assignment, to gauge where you’re at. I wouldn’t want you to be lost in the woods when exams roll around. You can bring your chair up to my desk.”  
  
“Um, yes,” I say, mentally gritting my teeth. I move to my desk to get it, clumsily maneuvering it to the front through the maze of feet and desks. Misha and Shizune are already looking over the assignment; the latter briefly meets my eyes as I pass, giving me an expression as if to say,  _‘What? Blame yourself.’_  
  
I back down from her wordless challenge, resignedly passing to the front of the room. I’m not daring enough to make a big deal out of this. I place my chair beside Mutou’s desk, setting the assignment on the surface in front of me.  
  
“All right,” he says, gesturing to the top of the paper. “Can you show me how you would answer this?”

* * *

Well, that could have gone better.  
  
The good news is that, after a great deal of arm-twisting on Mutou’s part, we were able to confirm that I haven’t _completely_ forgotten everything I’ve ever learned in science. The bad news is that, in order to get even a passing grade on the upcoming exams, I would have to spend the lion’s share of my free time mainlining the last quarter’s worth of material and assignments. I’m trying to envision a scenario where putting myself through such an ordeal would be worth it, but my imagination is failing me.  
  
I suppose the best argument in favor of trying in earnest to pass the exams is that I’ve never failed them before, and I don’t know if I’m emotionally prepared for whatever doing so would mean. There are many people, surely, who would see intentionally giving up on the exams as a very passive or very lazy suicide attempt. Exams are  _everything;_ without them, you're just an unremarkable worker ant.  
  
But, faced with a shortened lifespan, is it better to carry on as normal, or should one let go of their inhibitions and live like it’s the end of the world? I don’t know if I ever could, but the idea of throwing my life away reading dry passages about wave-particle duality is painful to contemplate.  
  
“Iwanako, you still with us?”  
  
I blink, torn from my sullen musings by the sound of my name. Molly is blinking at me from across the lunch table, her eyebrow arched with curiosity. To my considerable relief, she invited me to sit with her and her friends at lunchtime today, saving me from another silent lunch break with Shizune, but my unfamiliarity with the other students and the back-and-forth nature of the group conversation has made it something embarrassingly easy to withdraw from.  
  
“Y, yes,” I say, softly. “Sorry, I was lost in thought.”  
  
Molly smiles. “Well, penny for your thoughts, then?”  
  
“Err… It’s nothing, really,” I lie. I’m not ready to say what’s on my mind, especially not in a public setting.  
  
She pauses, still looking over at me, before her eyebrows flicker and she takes on a wan expression. “You’re not still brooding about Shizune’s… whole _thing_ this morning, are you?”

I feel my face blanch at the mention of the class rep. “Wh, what do you mean?”

I know exactly what she means, of course, but it’s troubling that Molly picked up on it so easily—and that she’s bringing it up, here, in front of everybody. Though my expression is guarded, I know I’m beginning to blush.  
  
“Come on; everyone here’s known Shizune for at least two years now,” she says, rolling her eyes wryly. “It was pretty obvious what she did to bug you.”  
  
The other classmates nod knowingly, making me redden even further. Were they watching me the whole time? I don’t want to talk about this with people I hardly know. Why are you doing this to me, Molly?  
  
“It’s… it’s fine,” I stammer nervously. “The class representative… has a responsibility to report any problems a student is having with the subject to the teacher. It’s what, what I would have done, in her position.” I don’t really believe my own words, but if it’ll move the topic of discussion away from  _me_ , I’ll say anything.  
  
Molly’s chocolate eyes fix me with a dubious look, but I steel my own gaze, and eventually she relents. “Fine,” she says tentatively. “I was just going to say, don’t worry about her. She’s the same with everyone.”  
  
Doesn’t sound like she cares much for Shizune, then, which only reinforces my suspicions that the class representative isn’t well-liked. I glance over to the table I sat at yesterday, where Shizune and Misha are, again, sitting alone, signing to each other. It occurs to me that they can’t be talking about anything particularly interesting or gossip-worthy, since a lot of people in the cafeteria could probably eavesdrop on them just by watching. I can probably afford to dismiss the nagging feeling that they’re chatting about  _me_. Probably.  
  
“Thanks,” I say, finally. “I haven’t been thinking about it, really. What were we talking about, again?”  
  
She blinks at me before answering. “The Festival. I asked you if you were going to help out with it.”  
  
Huh? I cock my head at her in confusion. “Sorry, what?”  
  
“You don’t know about the Yamaku Festival?”  
  
I shake my head. “Apparently not. That’s coming up?”  
  
“Err, yeah. It’s on Sunday. You haven’t heard people talking about it?”  
  
I shake my head wordlessly. Other than Misha and Momomi, I really didn’t speak to anybody yesterday. I'm not that talkative on the best of days, and yesterday...  
  
“Well, anyway,” Molly continues, “it’s a lot of fun… we set up a lot of games and food stands and stuff. The school, I mean. Most of us help out putting it together, or we run the stalls, or whatever.”  
  
I nod as I take in the new information, rubbing my chin contemplatively. A festival, huh? I’m not able to easily decide whether or not I’m in the mood for one. It sounds a little… bombastic for my liking, and who would I go with? On the other hand, these opportunities are fairly rare, and if there’s a chance I could have a good time, I don’t think I can afford to pass up on it in my present state of mind.  
  
“What are  _you_  doing for the festival?”  
  
She shrugs. “My family is coming down to see me, so I’m not helping out much this year. I volunteered to help clean up afterward, and that’s pretty much it.”  
  
I nod, not having much to say to that. So far, Molly’s the girl I’m most comfortable with at this school, if not quite a full-fledged friend, but if she’s going to spend that day with her family, I’ll have to go to the festival with somebody else.  
  
Going alone is an option, I guess, but it’s not a very good one—these sorts of convivial events are meant to be spent socializing with friends, not aimlessly drifting around by yourself. Inviting my mother to the festival springs to mind, but I’d have to give her notice early, and such an action reeks of failure.  _Yes, mother, sorry, I can’t even convince other people to go to a festival with me, come out here and eat takoyaki with me so I don’t look quite as pitiable._  
  
“So do you want to help out?”  
  
“Um,” I mumble, rolling a lock of my hair between my thumb and forefinger, “what’s left to do?”  
  
“Uh, I don’t know, actually,” Molly admits. “We delegated tasks a long time ago. All the shifts are taken, I think.”  
  
She turns to our classmates, who have been mostly sidetracked with their own discussion. “Do you guys know what’s left to do for the festival?”  
  
They shake their heads noncommittally and she turns back to me and shrugs. “Uh, you could always volunteer to be a backup, or something. Or you could ask Hakamichi and see what she needs help with. She’s always trying to rope somebody into giving her a hand with whatever.”  
  
“Er, no, that’s, fine,” I say, unenthused at the prospect of doing  _anything_  with the class rep. “I’m not… really all that eager to help out, anyway. I’m still sort of overwhelmed with things…”  
  
Molly nods, giving me an empathetic smile. “Yeah, I know. I don’t really blame you. Transferring in and all…” Then she blinks at me in sudden clarity. “Hey, shoot, I meant to ask you, why are you still wearing your old school uniform?”  
  
I roll my eyes, sighing sardonically. “They’re out of uniforms in my size, evidently. This is all I have.”  
  
“Oh, right, I’d forgotten all about that. Yeah, that’s a thing. The class of first-years was bigger than usual or something… I think a lot of them only got half as many uniforms as they were supposed to get. A lot of girls were complaining about it…”  
  
“Yes, well, it’s fine,” I insist. “This uniform is… comfortable.”  
  
The girl sitting next to Molly, a mousy girl with shoulder-length brown hair, looks over at me. “Wear the boy’s uniform, if you want. That’s allowed here.”  
  
 _A cardinal sin_. I can't help but pucker my face in disgust at the very idea. “Um… no.”  
  
Molly giggles. “Can’t say I blame you.”  
  
One of the other girls then shifts the focus of the conversation to somebody I’m unacquainted with, so I spend the remainder of the hour passively listening to the discussion, silently sipping at my tea. It feels… normal, I suppose, but I can’t help but fret that these new friendships I’m forming aren’t going to be very fulfilling. Most of the students here have, like Molly said, been together for at least two years, possibly longer. But when all is said and done, I won’t even have spent an entire school year with these people before I never see them again. Should I even bother? I don’t know.  
  
Soon enough, lunch ends, and we return to class, Molly still chatting with her friends along the way.  
  
The afternoon classes pass by extremely uneventfully. None of the other subjects taught are anywhere near as frustrating as Mutou’s class. By contrast, English is a course I could practically sleepwalk through. In fairness, I have always been skilled at it—I got an early start on it, since my parents speak it fluently—but, bafflingly, my English comprehension seems to have  _improved_  slightly since I was admitted to the hospital.  
  
I suppose it must be because, from a certain point of view, I’ve spent the last few weeks “studying” English: I spent roughly eighteen hours a day doing nothing but watching movies, and the vast majority of them were Hollywood movies. My comprehension of them was in this sort of liminal state where the subtitles were as annoying as they were helpful, so eventually I just turned them off and tried to focus harder on understanding the English. Unusually enough, this seems to have been a boon, academically speaking.  
  
It’s also during English class that the tall girl I somehow frightened yesterday reenters the room and shuffles to her seat like she’s trying not to be seen. Curiously, it seems to be working; nobody is looking at her, and even the teacher is ignoring her entrance. Now that I think about it, I don’t remember seeing her earlier, either.  
  
It’s a little weird. I assume it’s for medical reasons or something, but I’m not used to a student’s tardiness being accepted so nonchalantly. She’s been gone practically the whole day.

Even though I know I'm not supposed to, it's hard not to wonder what that girl's deal is.


	8. Testing the Waters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Underclassmen are always kind of adorable. Especially in pairs.

After school, I make my way back to the dorms and disrobe, placing my uniform in the closet, then retrieve the bathing suit I set aside earlier. In truth, I’m feeling a little lethargic, but if I don’t go to the pool now, I’m going to keep making excuses until I go to bed.  
  
There’s a full-length mirror mounted on the back of my dorm room door, and for a moment before putting on the bathing suit I can’t help but glance somberly at my own nude reflection. The thick crimson line still runs angrily down my sternum, screaming for attention. I force myself to look away and put on the suit.  
  
It fits pretty well: it’s not too tight, and it actually clings to my hips, which has been an issue I’ve had often in the past. More importantly, I can’t see my scar wearing this.  
  
I twirl in front of the mirror, assessing myself from various angles. Honestly, I think the bathing suit looks best from behind, but all and all my reflection looks… normal. This is pretty much how I  _should_  look if I’m going to go swimming. If I didn’t know I’d just been discharged from the hospital, could I guess? Not easily. That’s a little encouraging.  
  
I pull a sweatshirt and yoga pants on over the swimsuit, slip on some sandals and wash off my makeup in the sink, then grab my room key and head back the way I came. On the way out, I glance over at Momomi’s door, but she doesn’t appear to be in yet.  
  
There’s still a throng of students heading back to the dorms as I make my way to the administration building, but they don’t stare at me nearly as much as they do when I’m in my school uniform. It’s kind of funny, in a way: the student body at my old school never got so excited about transfer students, but at Yamaku it’s almost treated as a spectacle.  
  
When I get to the building, my first inclination is to go in the way I did yesterday morning to meet the nurse, but on a hunch, I decide to follow a pair of students with gym bags around the corner, and sure enough, they lead me to a less roundabout way of getting there. A pair of glass double doors opens up into a stark white hallway, with two entrances on the left side to the boys’ and girls’ respective locker rooms. Emboldened, I head in and prepare to change.  
  
There’s not many people in the locker room yet; there’s a younger girl sitting on one of the benches away from me, but she’s checking her blood sugar so intently that I decide to leave her alone. Most of the lockers are empty, so I pick one at random and deposit my clothes and shoes inside, then pull my hair into a ponytail. There’s a basket of folded towels next to the door opposite where I came in, so I help myself to one and exit into the pool area.  
  
The room is incredibly bright; the ceiling is at least eight meters high, and everything is painted a refreshing white and Persian orange, with a vaulted ceiling that’s more glass than metal. The floor is tiled in ceramic in intricate arabesque patterns, and the room’s periphery is a complex of decorative pillars and arches framing tall windows... this has got to be the most extravagant school swimming pool I’ve ever seen. I can see now why Mutou and the nurse mentioned it.  
  
There are some bleachers along the far wall, so maybe Yamaku actually has its own dedicated swim team, though I find that unlikely. One girl, still in her school uniform, sits alone in the front, talking to another in what appears to be the official school bathing suit. Given that I’m exempt from physical education thanks to my heart condition, the school never provided me with one of my own, which is probably for the best.  
  
Other than them, the pool seems strangely empty right now. A single lifeguard, a woman in her mid thirties, sits alone along the head of the pool, her nose in a biography, and the pool itself is empty, save for, surprisingly, a bald, middle-aged man doing laps back and forth down one lane. A member of the faculty?  
  
I walk over to the shallow end, taking a moment to wonder what it is I’m going to do, here. I don’t exactly know how to swim; I enjoy the beach well enough, but I’ve always avoided going too far into the ocean. I stepped barefoot on a beached jellyfish once as a child, and the experience frightened me enough that I’ve always stayed away from seawater since.  
  
I take a seat along the lip of the pool, letting my feet dangle in the water. Happily, it’s about twenty-seven degrees, not too cold at all. The nurse said walking around in the shallow end was acceptable physical activity, right? I can do that, I guess. I’m about to plunge into the water when I notice the two girls by the bleachers heading in my direction.  
  
The girl in the swimsuit gives me a friendly smile as I look up. “Hiya!”  
  
She has dark hair—lighter than mine but darker than Shizune’s—cropped to chin length, with evenly cut bangs falling just past her eyebrows, and she stands a few inches taller than me, with a lithe body that suggests she swims quite frequently.  
  
“Er… hi,” I say, a bit taken aback by her friendliness.  
  
“You’re that new third-year that just transferred in, right? I’ve seen you in the cafeteria…”  
  
“That’s right,” I answer, still vexed by the attention. “I’m Iwanako Daidouji.”  
  
“Ah, cool! I’m Aoi Sagawa. Call me Aoi.”  
  
“Nice to meet you, Aoi.”  
  
The girl next to her gives a tentative smile, nodding her head at me. “I’m, um, Keiko,” she says bashfully. “Keiko Kobayakawa…”  
  
She’s slightly shorter than Aoi, and her wavy, ash-colored hair falls to the middle of her back, with jagged bangs in front and a small braid tied on her left side. She has what appears to be a graphics tablet-screen tucked under the crook of her arm; it seems pretty expensive.  
  
“Hello, Keiko,” I say, still wondering where this is going to go. “Are you third-year students?”  
  
“Nah, second-year,” Aoi says, smiling. “Class 2-3. We’re pretty cool, I guess. You’re in the student council president’s class, aren’t you?”  
  
I blink at the question. “I am?”  
  
She snorts, and even Keiko smiles a little, as if I just told a funny joke. “Haha, yeah! Hakamichi’s class, right?”  
  
I pause for a moment, surprised. “Shizune is the student council president?”  
  
“Um, yeah, last I checked. Mikado’s on the council too.”  
  
“Who?”  
  
“The pink-haired girl? Laughs a lot?”  
  
“Oh… right,” I say, blinking again, startled. How did I forget to ask Misha for her full name? “Y, yes. They’re both in my class.”  
  
“Right. Cool,” she nods. “So, um, you like swimming?”  
  
“Not really,” I say with a wan smile, “but my mom bought me this bathing suit, so I figured I should at least learn how. I’m supposed to be exercising mo—”  
  
“Wait, whoa, you don’t know how to swim? Oh, cool, can I teach you?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“I’m an  _awesome_  swimmer. I’ve been doing it since, I was like, two. It’s the only sport I can do for a good amount of time, ’cause of my anhidrosis.”  
  
“Your _what_?”  
  
Keiko rolls her eyes with a lopsided smile. “She overheats if she isn’t refrigerated.”  
  
Aoi grins. “Haha, yeah. It’s like, I don’t sweat. At  _all_. So my body can’t regulate its temperature correctly. If there’s no air conditioning, I burst into flame. So that’s why I like swimming.”  
  
“Uh… Wow.”  
  
“But, yeah, so I could totally teach you if you wanted. You know this pool is salinated, right? Not chlorinated. So you kind of taste like kimchi until you take a shower, but it’s way less harsh on your skin. It’s new technology. Well, newish. I think.”  
  
“Er—”  
  
“But, yeah, usually everybody is at their club meetings around now, so there’s never anybody here. Just me and Keiko. And Keiko never swims ’cause she’s a stick in the mud.”  
  
“She’s lying,” Keiko says sweetly. “I swim with her on Thursdays.”  
  
“Oh, I’m  _sorry_ , she swims  _once a week_. The rest of the time I’m alone.”  
  
“Sure, except that I sit right over there every  _other_  day of the week. And chat with you. Constantly,” Keiko adds.  
  
“I—”  
  
“Shoosh, Keiko, you’re not helping me convince her.”  
  
“Why are we trying to convince her?”  
  
“Because, come on, it’d be awesome.”  
  
“Maybe she wants to join a club or something, you don’t know that.”  
  
“Hey—”  
  
“Why would she want to join a club? The only clubs that still have openings are all crap. She’s not going to join a club.”  
  
“The art club has openings—”  
  
“Oh, sure, weirdo central, I bet she’s just  _dying_  to join that club.”  
  
“It isn’t that bad and you know it.”  
  
“You say that, yet you do all your drawing over here—”  
  
“ _Okay!_ ”  
  
My interjection is finally loud enough to buy me a moment of silence, and I use it to sigh before answering the underclassmen. “If you want to teach me how to swim, that’d be great, thanks. I need to start exercising more, anyway.”  
  
A spur-of-the-moment decision, perhaps, but there’s nothing binding me to it. And, frankly, I  _would_  like to learn how to swim. The alternative is running, and I’m prone to very uncomfortable shin splints.  
  
My answer seems to catch Aoi off guard for a moment, but then she pumps her fist in the air as the realization dawns on her. “ _Woot_! You won’t regret this!”  
  
“Hopefully…”  
  
“Don’t worry,” Keiko says, smiling at me reassuringly. “We’re not as lame as we sound. I suppose I’ll get back to doodling…”  
  
She returns to her seat by the bleachers and sips thoughtfully from a can of milk tea as she sits down and resumes whatever it is she does with that tablet. Judging by the intensity in her expression, she’s doing something more serious than ‘doodling’, but I’m at a loss as to what that could be.  
  
“She’s always doing that,” Aoi sighs. “She’d be doing it in class if the teachers would let her.”  
  
“What does she draw on that thing?”  
  
“Manga, if you can believe it. Don’t ask if you can see it, though. She’s totally my BFF and even  _I’m_  not allowed to look.”  
  
“Forbidden fruit, huh?”  
  
“Yeah.” She leans close, cupping her hand to her mouth. “(Personally, I think it’s probably something really hot and steamy. Keiko might look sweet, but she’s really a sicko…)”  
  
I nearly fall into the pool. _“W-what?!”_  
  
“So!” She claps her hands together. “Swimming lessons! Let’s get started, ’kay?”

Aoi spends the next hour giving me instruction more than actually having me  _do_  anything; she insists upon my walking around the pool until I’m “comfortable” with it, as if I’m a six-year-old afraid of the water, then she tells me to drift toward the deep end and practice “not drowning”. Though it looks elementary when she does it, my motions aren’t nearly as successful, but eventually I’m able to tread water, however clumsily. When she’s satisfied I can do it for an entire minute, she lets me return to the shallow side and spend the remainder of the hour practicing arm strokes.

All in all, I wish I had started this earlier.

 


	9. Grudge Matching

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grudges are like termites. You can never be sure just how many of them are behind the wall.

Aoi and Keiko have errands to run before heading back to the dorms, so I say my farewells and dry off to the best of my ability, retrieving my clothes from the locker room and heading back the way I came. I’m left with a good feeling about the adventure, though. The two of them are a little immature, but they’re friendly enough. Aoi is a bit too hyperactive, but I can’t help but like her anyway. Keiko on the other hand seems a bit introverted, but kind of adorable.  
  
I thought there would be more students headed back to the dorms from their club meetings, but it seems like fewer people than I had expected. Maybe they’re all working overtime on that festival? It sounds like kind of a big deal… Maybe it really  _will_  be a good time.  
  
As soon as I step into my hallway, I hear Susano’o barking emphatically from behind Momomi’s door. Like clockwork, the door swings open, and the German shepherd looks at me with a dopey doggy smile.  
  
“Good evening, Rocky.”  
  
Momomi smirks at me from the doorway, a steaming mug of coffee in her hand. She’s wearing the same bathrobe I saw her in yesterday—it appears as though she doesn’t like to wear her school uniform any longer than she has to. She’s still wearing the same sunglasses as before, but they’re pushed to the top of her head, holding her hair back like an Alice band. I can finally see her eyes; they’re a very dark grey, nearly black, but surprisingly, there’s nothing  _wrong_  with them, no cataracts or protrusions or anything. They’re so… normal. It’s almost as though she’s really looking at me.  
  
“Hello, Momomi.”  
  
She takes a sip from her mug, still smirking. “You’re back later than I expected. Did you join a club?”  
  
Why does it matter? Is she keeping tabs on me?  
  
“No,” I answer, “I just decided to go swimming.”  
  
“Ah,  _good_. Wouldn’t want you to make any  _rash judgments_  or anything.”  
  
“Rash… judgments?”  
  
“Yes. There were certain… groups at this school I thought you might wind up being unfairly coerced into joining,” she says, a hint of derision seeping into her voice. “You wouldn’t have liked them, I don’t think.”  
  
 _What? What groups could she be talking about?_  
  
“What had you so concerned?”  
  
“Well, no  _offense_ , but you come off as the kind of girl who’s easily pushed around—“  
  
“Hey—!”  
  
“—and there are girls at this school, who will go unnamed, who love  _nothing_  more than to push people around. I was worried that, as a transfer student still…  _unfamiliar_  with the way things go at Yamaku Academy, somebody would try to take advantage of you.”  
  
I stare at her quizzically for a moment, wondering if she was legitimately concerned for me, or if she’s just messing with me herself. Nothing she says sounds sincere; there’s even a small, niggling doubt in the back of my mind that she’s actually  _blind_ , but that might just be the effect she has on people.  
  
Too curious to let the subject pass, I decide to take the bait. “What clubs in particular shouldn’t I join?”  
  
Momomi grins, sipping thoughtfully from the steaming mug in her hand. “I probably shouldn’t say.”  
  
“What?!” I say, flabbergasted. “Why not?”  
  
“Well, because then you’d know who I was maligning, and then  _those_  people might hear about it, and then I’d surely get into an  _immensely_  undesirable confrontation with those people where I’d be very hypocritically accused of being a  _corrupting influence_  on you,” she answers, nonchalantly taking another sip. “Take my word for it, it wouldn’t work out for any of us.”  
  
“Then how am I supposed to know what club I shouldn’t join?”  
  
“Well, tell me, are you even planning on  _joining_  a club? It’s not mandatory here, you know. I know some people say you may as well, stranded in the boondocks like this, but those people are boors.”  
  
“Well, er, I don’t know, I hadn’t given it much thought one way or the other. I enjoyed the club at my last school.”  
  
“Oh~?” She quirks an eyebrow, suddenly seeming unsettlingly interested. “What club was that, Rocky?”  
  
“The ikebana club. I was the president… Well, I was, but then we merged with the tea club…”  
  
“ _Ha!_  You’re kidding, right?”  
  
“N, no…”  
  
“ _Kyaaahahahaha!_ ” Her laughter is sharp, almost metallic, like that of a stage villain getting away with some kind of serious crime. “Hell, I knew you were a sweet girl but I didn’t realize you were a  _princess_.”  
  
I can feel the heat rising in my cheeks, and I turn away, embarrassed. “Why… why are you making fun of me? I… that’s… that’s just what I like to do.”  
  
“Sincerely?  _Sincerely_. You sat for an hour every day in a kimono pouring tea and fiddling with flowers, and you not only unironically  _enjoyed_  this, but you found enough like-minded girls to turn it into a  _club_? I just… I can’t… I can’t… I’m baffled. I can’t believe that anybody being honest with themselves would actually want to do that.”  
  
There’s a strange expression on her face; she still has an amused smile, but the corners of her eyebrows are pointed downward, as if she’s vexed. It’s like she’s genuinely flustered by what I’m saying.  
  
“I… I liked it. I don’t know. I’d been friends with everybody in the club for years. It was just an excuse to lounge around and chat,” I say, defensively.  
  
“Uh- _huh_ ,” she says, still incredulous. “Well, whatever. We don’t have an ikebana club here, and there's only two girls in the tea club—of whom both are  _complete_ mouth-breathers, so you'll probably want to steer clear. The next closest thing is the photography club, and they’re really less a club than a collective of social rejects perpetually fighting over a closet-sized darkroom.”  
  
An unusual insight from a girl who ostensibly can’t even appreciate photography. Momomi doesn’t seem to have anything nice to say about anybody; it makes me wonder what she’ll say about me when  _I’m_  not around.  
  
Actually, she didn’t have anything good to say about Shizune yesterday, did she? She said ‘you poor thing’ when I brought it up… And Aoi did mention Shizune was in the student council…  
  
“The club you don’t want me to join is the student council.” It’s more of a statement than a question.  
  
Momomi blinks for a moment, pausing before answering. “And what makes you say  _that_?”  
  
“It is, isn’t it? You don’t like Shizune.”  
  
Setting the mug down, she crosses her arms, her brow furrowed. “I’ll neither confirm nor deny that.”  
  
“Fine,” I say, crossing my arms as well, though the posture surely has no effect on her. “Then tomorrow, I’ll join the student council,” I bluff.  
  
“What do I care? Do whatever you like.”  
  
“I will,” I say petulantly.  
  
“…Damn it,” she says, losing her patience. “ _Fine_. Yes. You shouldn’t join the student council, no matter how much she tries to push it on you. You’ll just be doing chores for her all day. There’s only two people on the student council and she still asks for more responsibilities anyway.”  
  
“What? There’s only two people in the student council? Why?”  
  
“Because  _Shizune_  is on the student council. Come on, try to keep up.”  
  
It’s frustrating how caustic Momomi is, but it’s kind of endearing to see that somebody dislikes Shizune even more than I do. I’d like to know why, especially since Momomi would seemingly not get a lot of exposure to her as a blind girl, but I doubt I could wring the information out of her without getting to know Momomi better.  
  
“Er… I appreciate the concern, I guess,” I offer, “but it’s misplaced. Shizune doesn’t seem to like me. She won’t even  _speak_  to me. I didn’t even know she was student council president until a girl told me an hour ago.”  
  
Momomi’s eyebrow quirks at this, and to her credit she does seem genuinely surprised. “ _Goodness_. Really? My, that’s unusual… She’s usually  _very_  forward about it.”  
  
“You… you know her pretty well, then?”  
  
“I do know her, yes.”  
  
“And… you don’t like her.”  
  
“Do  _you_?”  
  
I frown, not liking the taste of my own question. “I don’t know her that well,” I finally answer, diplomatically.  
  
“Mm- _hmm_. Well,  _apparently_  you’re the kind of girl who just likes to ‘lounge around’, so if you don’t know if you don’t like her, you’ll know soon. Shizune’s a real piece of work.” She sighs and bends down, aggressively massaging the skin of her dog’s face and neck with her hands. He silently accepts the cruel and unusual treatment, his eyes still on me.  
  
“So, I take it  _you’re_  not in a club?”  
  
She gives me a wan smile. “Nope. Not anymore.”  
  
“Which club was that?”  
  
“Don’t you have a shower to take?”  
  
A pregnant pause passes between us before a moment of clarity clicks into my head, and I can only laugh. “Yes. I suppose I do.”  
  
“See you tomorrow, Rocky.”  
  
She briskly shuts the door, and, sighing, I head for the bathrooms.  
  
There’s something about speaking with Momomi where I just  _know_  she’s deliberately being unkind, but I can’t help but find speaking to her fascinating. There’s… a kind of defiant strength about her, even though every word she says seems to drip with spite. It’s the only explanation for why I spoke to her for so long.  
  
I can’t help but think about our conversation as I soak in the shower. Her dislike of Shizune, and her reaction to my having been in such a girly club… I feel like there’s more to this, but I’m too tired to figure it out.  
  
Why  _did_  I join the ikebana club? It feels like a lifetime ago. I can’t recall the thought process which led to my choosing  _that_  club over all others. And yet I was eventually put in charge of it, a role I held until my heart attack ripped me out of that reality. What was my purpose? What did I set out to do?  
  
It was all in vain, whatever it was. I’m here now, for whatever reason, and I need to figure out what that means.  
  
I’m feeling better, though. About some things, anyway. Aoi and Keiko seem nice, and Molly has been friendly. Even Momomi is interesting, if nothing else. Shizune’s the only person I’m having trouble with, but at least I don’t seem to be alone in that regard.  
  
I suppose that for now I’m going to let the science class situation resolve however it will, and continue swimming after class, at least until I decide I’m sick of it. Maybe tomorrow I’ll try going into town. If I can just keep doing things this way, one day at a time, maybe things will turn out okay in the end. Maybe.  
  
Wrapping my hair in a towel, I return to my room and put my nightgown on, getting the day’s homework out of my bag. It doesn’t look any more appealing than it did when it was assigned, but the path of least resistance is just to sit down and suffer through it, so I get started.  
  
As long as I don’t bite off more than I can chew, I’ll be okay.


	10. Not So Cute

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Huge risks are taken, and big surprises are enjoyed.

Another day, another obtuse science assignment.  
  
The morning’s chatter is somewhat muted; short of my quick response to Misha's bright greeting when I walked in, I haven’t actually said a word to anybody since I sat down.  
  
For my part, I’m holding it all together. I woke up just early enough to rush through my morning rituals, pop my pills, and make it to class with dignity intact, though not early enough to have any breakfast. I’ll probably regret that later, but for now I’m trying to pretend my energy drink is filling.  
  
The teacher seemingly isn’t interested in calling me up to the front again for a public demonstration of my incompetence, so it seems I have no other choice than to get started on the schoolwork. Based on a cursory glance at it, I have about a one-in-three chance of completing it to Mutou’s satisfaction; the best odds I’ve had all week, frankly. I guess this worksheet is going to be covered in crimson the next time I see it.  
  
Ten minutes into class, that tall girl whose name I still haven’t bothered to learn drifts into the classroom with the cadence of a frightened doe. As before, nobody acknowledges it. In all honesty, something about it really brings me down… like watching a juggler drop one of his balls mid-performance, though I can’t pin down exactly what it is.  
  
The cynic in me notes that, if I wanted to look like an airhead, I could probably come into class an hour late, and when confronted about it, say that I thought that was acceptable at this school, but of course that notion is completely awful and I immediately scold myself for thinking it.  
  
Suddenly, the teacher decides to announce that we’ll all be breaking up into groups again. It’s more than a little annoying—why did he wait until I was already ten minutes into the assignment to say this? Did he just forget or something?  
  
For that matter, who am I even supposed to group with? Molly always works with her little clique in the front row—I couldn’t join her already bloated collective without the teacher intervening and splitting us off—and Shizune and I clearly aren’t getting along. The teacher obviously expects me to work with the class representative, so I can’t easily ask him to personally aid me on the assignment without putting a spotlight on the growing enmity I have with Shizune.  
  
In search of a solution, I glance at the desk behind me, only to find a very overweight student blithely snoozing in his chair. Great… Rock and a hard place, indeed.  
  
Looking a bit more desperately for some way out of this situation, I peer over the whole classroom, but every student seems to form their usual groups, and in all honesty there’s no reasonable way to go completely across the room and join one without making it painfully obvious I can’t work alone and don’t want to work with Shizune.  
  
In fact, the only student who  _isn’t_  already in a group is that tall girl who never speaks to anybody…  
  
Hmm.  
  
Dare I?  
  
No, it couldn’t be that easy, could it?  
  
The tall girl is obviously skittish and asocial; I’ve seen more than enough evidence of that in the handful of occasions I’ve paid attention to her over the last few days. She’s not forming a group, either, and none of the students in the vicinity are making any effort to include her, so at the very  _least_  she’s got to be capable of doing the schoolwork solo, which means she’s almost  _certainly_  knowledgeable enough to help me survive this assignment. If I walk over there and partner up with her, I’ll appear as though I was simply concerned she wasn’t a part of any group, avoiding publically snubbing the class rep  _and_  getting my direly-needed assistance on this assignment.  
  
Goodness… This has to be the most creative solution I’ve come up with all year.  
  
“Molly?” I don’t need to lower my voice; at its normal level it’s already nearly drowned out by background conversations.  
  
“Hmm?”  
  
“That girl who just walked in… what is her name?”  
  
She furrows her brow, no doubt wondering where I’m going with this. “Hanako Ikezawa… why do you—“  
  
“Great. See you,” I say, briskly picking up my chair and inelegantly brushing past Misha and Shizune, who reflexively turn to monitor me the moment they realize I’m fleeing. They’re not the only ones; as people begin to notice I’m moving about the room, several sets of eyes peer at me, no doubt trying to ascertain my destination. I’m not sure what I ever did to deserve this much attention, but I guess this is what passes for interesting at Yamaku.  
  
Absurdly, I begin to feel the pangs of stage fright as soon as I’m within half a meter of Ikezawa’s desk, and I realize I know absolutely nothing about this girl. Maybe she bites people, or something. God, I hope she doesn’t.  
  
Come on, Daidouji, you can do this... Rouse up whatever vestiges remain of the gentle, personable class representative you used to be. You’re not sullen at all; you’re chipper, and unthreatening.  
  
“Hello~! You’re Hanako Ikezawa, right?” I smile, my voice such a poised, saccharine chirp that I nearly expect sparkles to fly from my eyes in a dramatic fashion.  
  
She sits up with a start, as though horrified somebody’s acknowledging her existence, and looks over at me in shock, and for the first time, we actually make eye contact—  
  
 _OH—!  
  
Oh gosh her face—_  
  
No! Focus on the eyes, focus on the eyes, do  _not_  look away, do  _not_  let her notice that you’ve picked up on the reason she goes to this school, do  _not_  scare her off, and do  _not_  pause for too long— _Move!_  
  
“H-hi!” I stammer, doggedly forcing myself to continue on with this corny façade. “I’m, ah, Iwanako, obviously. I saw that you weren’t in a group yet and was wondering if you might like to be my partner? I’m… not too great at this on my own…”  
  
She pauses for a long moment, long enough for me to notice that the entire class has gone silent. For some perverse reason, this girl and I have captured the attention of seemingly every student in the classroom. I have no idea why. Maybe they were hoping I’d look away in disgust and lose face? Or perhaps they’re watching me warily, nervous that I’m going to do something cruel to her?  
  
She’s noticed, too, and to my chagrin, she seems paralyzed by the attention. It makes me feel like a jerk… I never meant to freak her out like this, but I didn’t take the rest of the class into consideration and now a dozen people are staring at us bug-eyed.  
  
Well, this is certainly another fine mess I’ve gotten myself into. She’s going to stand up and rush out of the classroom, and I’m going to have to return to my desk with my tail between my legs, maybe even get in trouble with the teacher… This was a bad idea, a  _really_  bad idea… I should have just forced my way into Molly’s group…  
  
“O… okay.”  
  
…Hmm?  
  
Holy mother of pearl, really?  
  
I try to wipe the bewilderment off my face and fail miserably. I can’t believe that worked… But I guess there’s something to be said for looking as unthreatening as possible. Even agitable, evasive introverts like Ikezawa won’t exceed Threat Condition Bravo if you look like they could effortlessly punt you out a window. And I’m probably the shortest girl in class.  
  
“Great!” I attempt to shoot her an award-winning smile, with all the technique of a plumber performing a colostomy. “I appreciate this, really.”  
  
“N-no problem… Iwanako.”  
  
She goes back to hiding in her hair as I pull my chair up to the other side of her desk, and gradually the other students go back to their normal activities, apparently underwhelmed by Ikezawa’s reaction. Cautiously, I peer over my right shoulder to find Shizune glaring daggers at me, but she turns away just as our eyes meet.  
  
Well, looks like she saw right through my improvised gambit, though that really comes as no surprise. It doesn’t matter, since evading her this way helps keep whatever’s going on between us from escalating, at least publicly.  
  
Ikezawa is blinking at me when I turn back to look at her, though she quickly glances down at the assignment. Did she see that, just now? It can’t be  _that_  obvious we dislike each other, can it?  
  
“Ah, um,” I say, trying to change the subject, “looks like this is mostly reading, so we can afford to take this at a leisurely pace, then work on the questions at the end together, right?”  
  
Ikezawa offers a quick nod and picks up her copy of the assignment, reading it upright with her hand as if using it to shield herself from me, terrifying harpy that I am.  
  
I begin reading the assignment myself, with a little more dedication now that things appear less hopeless, though I’m unable to avoid occasionally stealing covert glances at Ikezawa’s burn scars. As I’ve only ever seen her from a few meters away, I’d never noticed them before, since she keeps them so well hidden in her hair, but they cover almost half her face and run down her neck. It’s, well, shocking.  
  
They’re horrible-looking, but it seems an easy enough gesture to just dismiss them as a sad, weird-looking characteristic. I’m about to return to the classwork when a giant, terrible epiphany crashes down on me, one that makes my stomach sink.  
  
Her scars are the only meaningful difference between us.  
  
They’re a memento of the worst day of her life. They  _have_  to be. And because she can’t easily conceal them, this is the consequence: somebody who melts down so often that they can’t even stay in class for the whole day. A girl so easily frightened from her injuries that even another girl, as injured as she is, can’t easily approach her without being as gentle as possible.  
  
And yet, it all makes sense. It makes  _so much_  sense to me that it’s  _horrifying_. If I had those scars instead of my own, I don’t know that I’d behave any differently. I can’t  _imagine_  acting differently. It only seems wrong to me now because I have the cruel luxury of this unique through-the-looking-glass experience with Ikezawa.  
  
In fact, even now, I don’t know if I could say I’m any better off. Her self-imposed solitude is carefully maintained, something necessary for her survival, and I exploited it in order to get away from somebody I can’t stand. I look as bad as Ikezawa does… It’s just that most of my scars are on the inside.  
  
Though... Hanako Ikezawa  _is_  beautiful, even  _with_  the scars, though she’s probably unaware of this—I certainly can’t blame her. Her long, straight hair is nearly flawless, and her large, dark eyes are almost amethyst in color, if one is ever lucky enough to catch a glimpse of them. She isn’t ugly or frightening in the least; she’s just… wounded. Like me.  
  
But the scary thing is… those scars are old, very old… She’s had a while to live with them. If, even now, Ikezawa only hides within herself, then what hope is there for me? Is there more to it than this? Does she know something I don’t?  
  
Suddenly she looks up, finally noticing my gormless stare. She faces me with a startled expression that is a perfect mirror of my own, an endless feedback loop of self-conscious horror.  
  
Finally, she breaks us free. “Are… y-you ready for the questions?”  
  
“Oh, uh, yes,” I reply softly, shaking myself out of yet another contemplative fugue. “How about I give my best shot to the first one, and you tell me as soon as I muck it up?”  
  
She nods, silently and a bit hesitantly—it probably  _is_  a bit too much to ask her to call me out on being wrong, but I think that I’ve actually managed to puzzle this one out okay, thanks to some of the corrective guidance Mutou gave me yesterday. I jot down my best-sounding answer to the problem, making ad hoc corrections to my own logic as soon as my mistakes become apparent, and when I’m finally satisfied, I spin the paper around and show it to her.  
  
“Is this okay?”  
  
She takes the paper and reads it over carefully, nodding a couple times in succession, and I almost get my hopes up that I’ve finally succeeded at this subject when she takes out her pencil and makes several corrective scribbles over my elegantly-penned, completely unserviceable answer.  
  
“…Close,” she murmurs apologetically.  
  
I exhale resignedly, though I shouldn’t have had high expectations to begin with. If nothing else, I had the right answer, somehow, even if my way of getting there was obviously incorrect.  
  
“H-here… Watch me.”  
  
Writing with the paper sideways so I can see what she’s doing from the other side of the desk, she succinctly answers the second question, working slowly enough for me to follow her logic in real-time as she writes it. Finally, she finishes the question and spins the paper completely around so that I can review her technique. She’s done a really good job of showing her work; I can actually completely understand how she came to this solution, though I’d never have reached it myself. It’s obvious that she’s really bright, probably smarter than me, though that’s not really a high benchmark.  
  
“I would have been hopeless, doing this by myself,” I say appreciatively. “Thank you for your help, Ikezawa.”  
  
She gives only a gentle nod in response, but then adds, “…You can call me Hanako…”  
  
“Very well, Hanako,” I answer, a little surprised. The corners of my mouth begin to crease toward a smile, and I realize she’s starting to grow on me.  
  
Hmm… Do I push my luck? For all I know, she never wants this to happen again… On the other hand, I’ve already been pleasantly surprised… Whatever. Nothing ventured. And I want to get to know her better… Maybe I  _have_  to get to know her better.  
  
“Hanako… Do you think you’d be willing to pair up like this again if there’s another group assignment?”  
  
Another long Ikezawa pause, but I’m used to them by now, and as I watch her hopefully, she slowly nods again. It takes all my composure not to triumphantly pump my fist like Aoi, but I can’t help but grin at this turn of events.  
  
“Wonderful.”  
  
Though the conversation peters out after that, I spend the next few minutes silently basking in my success as Hanako quietly goes over her notes from the previous class. Eventually the teacher collects the completed assignments, and students begin to file out of the classroom for the lunch break.  
  
Hanako doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. I turn to her as I stand up from my seat. “Are you eating lunch in here?”  
  
“N, no. I’m… waiting for somebody.”  
  
Huh, so she  _does_  have friends. That’s a relief to hear. I want to know more, but I think I’ve probably bugged her enough for today.  
  
“Oh, well, see you in a bit, then.”  
  
“Bye… Iwanako.”  
  
Molly is still making her way to the doorway when I pick up my belongings, so I move to catch up with her as she exits the classroom. Turning my head, I wave to Hanako, and she gingerly waves a hand back.  
  
Maybe she’ll be more at ease with me from now on? Wishful thinking…  
  
“Look at you, making friends left and right,” Molly says, grinning. “Can’t say I expected you to do  _that_. Shizune’s eyes were the size of dinner plates.”  
  
“I don’t… I don’t see why it’s such a big deal,” I mumble, reddening at Molly’s reaction despite myself. “Hanako seems pretty nice…”  
  
“You can’t just  _talk_  to that girl,” she sighs. “She usually runs off when group work is assigned. If I’d had any idea you were going to do that, I would have tried to stop you, but then you got ahead of me so I had no choice but to sit and watch the train wreck unfold.”  
  
“Err—“  
  
“I just can’t believe she went for it. She must be in a good mood today, or something.”  
  
Before I can protest her not affording me any credit in the matter, we turn a corner and—  
  
CRACK—  
  
Something  _hard_  and  _fast_  collides with my sternum, knocking me to the ground with the force of a pneumatic drill. It overruns me completely, and everything goes black as the back of my head collides with the linoleum, and my ears begin to ring like cathedral bells. My entire body sings with pain—  
  
"Aw man, I— Oh, oh _crap_. Are you all right? Oh my god…"  
  
There's a gentle sensation of someone else's hair tickling my cheeks… strawberries? I open my eyes to an unfamiliar face leaning over me. Urgh… Where am I, again? My head…  
  
"Shit! I'm so, so sorry…"  
  
"Ibarazaki, what the  _hell?!_ "  
  
The stranger turns away from me. "She just came out of nowhere—I didn't—" She turns back to me. "You're okay, right? I… do you need me to get the nurse?"  
  
I try to answer her, but as I shift to speak I feel a heaviness in my chest… It's a sharp, sucking pain… I feel as if there's something I'm forgetting, but I just can't… I just can't get it back…  
  
 _thumpthump_  
  
There's a pounding under my sternum, almost like getting hit from the opposite side, but I'm on the floor, now. My jaw hurts, my neck hurts… I can't seem to breathe right… It reminds me of…  
  
 _?!_  
  
…No. No please no. Please stop… Please… Just calm down… Calm down calm down calm down, please…  
  
"Oh my god. I'll get him, Emi…"  
  
Huge, glistening green eyes hover above me, glistening further as the seconds pass. "I…" she begins, "everything's going to be okay, I—Do you need water? Can you talk?"  
  
I manage to shake my head, though I stop almost immediately when I realize how much the movement hurts…  
  
I… there's something I'm supposed to do here. There is. There _is!_ Somebody said something, there's some kind of… exercise I can do to stop this, I don't think I'm making this all up—  
  
If I believe it strongly enough, it has to go away. It has to. It  _has_  to. I… I did my best. I _had faith_  in this. I got a makeover. I made friends. I applied myself. I swam in the pool. I was going to go to the Festival… This was supposed to be my second chance. I'm supposed to get my second chance… This wouldn't happen to me now. It  _wouldn't._ It doesn't make any sense.  
  
So just focus… Just…  
  
 _thumpthumpthumpthump_  
  
No!  _WHY?_  Why  _is this happening?!_  
  
Oh, god.  
  
God, it really is.  
  
It's really happening…  
  
…This is it, isn't it? This is all I get… Four months in the hospital, three days in school… and my life is over because this idiot can't watch where she's going. I never should have thought I was safe… It really  _is_ that quick, that effortless. You get  _one_ shoddy, factory reject of a heart, and as soon as it's gone… that's it, game over. You don't even get to make your own terms.  
  
I can't believe this…  
  
The knot in my chest is tightening… I can still feel sensation in my fingertips, but it's just a matter of time. I remember how this goes.  
  
"No no no… Stay with me, okay? The Nurse is coming, you're gonna be fine…"  
  
You'd like that, wouldn't you? Face it, we're both screwed. Who  _are_ you, even? I guess I'll never even know. I'll never know anything.  
  
I can feel the vibrations in the floor as various pairs of feet stomp their way around me. Worried conversations erupt along all sides of me, filling the world with noise. I try to pick out individual voices, but it's impossible. What does it matter anymore, anyway? There's nothing I can do. I'm only here for a little while longer. And then… then what? Then nothing. Then whatever.  
  
…Hands. Hands behind my head, hands under my back, hands under my feet… I'm being lifted onto something… A board of some kind? A stretcher. I guess the cavalry rode in…  
  
The throbbing in my chest intensifies. It's getting harder and harder to stay aware of my surroundings… But I don't even need to be aware; I'm just going to be dragged to a hospital, so I can die without even a single iota of dignity.  
  
Mother, I'm sorry. I never wanted it to be this way. I tried to make this work, I really, really did. I never wanted to make you sad, not like this. I would never have left you without saying goodbye.  
  
In the end, there was never anything I could have done.  
  
Damn it…


	11. Cardioblivion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Iwanako has some old experiences and some new ones.

My head throbs with pain, amidst a haze of dizziness and nausea… did I just come out of surgery?  
  
Cracking my eyes open, I flinch at the corona of sterile fluorescent light that erupts into my vision. I’m on a bed of some kind…  
  
Blindly wandering my hands around, eventually my fingers rest upon the cool, distinctive metal railings of a hospital bed. I’m in a hospital… this is where I’m supposed to be.   
  
I… I think…  
  
Pressing my hands against the bedsheet-covered faux leather of the hospital bed, I begin to make an effort to push myself upright, but I’m too drained to pick up any sort of momentum. I try to roll onto my side, but there’s something tugging at my chest, stomach, and wrists… and my ankles. Am I bound down?  
  
Though it’s hard to see fine detail, and the effort makes me want to vomit, I manage to focus on my hand long enough to see the distinctive taped cable of an electrode. I’m hooked up to an EKG machine. I haven’t been hooked up to an EKG in… in a while. Was… was I scheduled for another operation? I don’t remember the cardiologist saying anything about that…  
  
I feel around quasi-blindly for a remote to adjust the bed, glancing over to the nightstand where I usually set it down before going to sleep. Confusingly, the nightstand isn’t there. Instead, there’s a dividing curtain…?!  
  
This isn’t my usual hospital room. Where are all my things? What’s going on?  
  
Looking on the other side of the bed, there’s a large window, and I have to squint to look at it, as the light from outside practically scalds my eyes. I do find a small side table, and proceed to clumsily navigate its surface with my hand until I locate the remote control I’m looking for. The remote, as well, has a different layout than I’m used to. This isn’t the bed I usually sleep on.  
  
As I elevate the head of the bed, my thumb and forefinger angrily pinching down on the little green triangle, more and more of the view behind the window comes into view, revealing not the parking lot and residential neighborhood I’m used to seeing, but… trees and hills? I’m not in Shibuya. What hospital is this? Where  _am_  I?!  
  
Could I have been moved somewhere else, perhaps for some kind of uncommon operation? I peer down into the V-neck of the hospital gown I only just now realized I’m wearing. Other than the six distinctive electrodes, I can see that my scar is still the same—the smooth, wine-colored line I’ve grown accustomed to. It’s unbandaged… Nobody’s operated on my heart. So why am I here?  
  
Trying to focus only seems to blur my vision further, and remind me of the painful throbbing within my skull. It’s as though a rabid stoat is rampaging between my ears. I’ve never had a headache this bad in my life.  
  
I move to caress my temples, and a strand of bleached blonde hair falls into my line of vision. Why… why is it…?  
  
For easily a minute—or maybe not, who even knows—I stare at it, nonplussed, trying to figure out why it’s there, trying to puzzle out what it means, until, finally, a flash of insight triggers me to worm my way out of the delirium I’m in.  
  
Of course, of course… I’m an idiot. I got my hair done when I was released from the hospital. I went back to school. At least, I’m pretty sure I did… My memories are a mess. I haven’t felt this bad since… since, well, the last time I woke up in a hospital unexpectedly.  
  
But it seems that, this time, I don’t get the tableau of concerned-looking people I woke up to back then. No nurses, no Mother, no Hisao. Just an empty, white room in an unfamiliar hospital, and I can’t even remember why I’m here. And my vision is still blurry… why? I’m not myopic…  
  
“Hello?” I ask, though my hoarse throat nearly drowns out the noise. “Is…” I cough, “is there someone there?”  
  
No answer, of course. My voice wouldn’t carry into a hallway even if I  _wasn’t_  feeling awful and exhausted. That leaves one other option, a hospital call button, but I can’t seem to locate the cord that would activate it. Usually medical staff is supposed to affix it to the bed railing somehow, but apparently I don’t deserve such courtesies.  
  
There’s a phone on the table next to my bed, and next to it is a list of extensions for reaching different areas of the hospital. As I try to read the list, though, the words blur together horribly, and trying to focus on them only worsens my already-splitting headache. It’s as though I’ve awoken to find myself in one of those insufferable point-and-click puzzles where you find yourself stuck in a room for no clear reason and you have to escape it in the most unintuitive way possible.  
  
Well, hospital telephones usually let you dial 110, if nothing else. I could dial that easily enough, but what would I say to emergency services when they picked up?  _I’m in a completely safe hospital room and I have no idea why, and I couldn’t read how to dial an outside number, so I called the police._  Something tells me that wouldn’t really get me the result I desire.  
  
Wait… I’m hooked up to an EKG machine. God, I really am such an idiot.  
  
Sticking my hand into my hospital gown, I grab hold of the electrodes taped to my chest and yank them off with one frustrated jerk. Like clockwork, the EKG goes from its typical staccato rhythm of emotionless beeps to one, long, urgent screech. The sound doesn’t do any favors for the migraine I’m having, but if it doesn’t compel somebody to show up, then this has to be an abandoned hospital, and I’ve seen enough movies to know that if it  _is_ , heart problems are surely the  _least_  of my worries.  
  
There’s a long enough pause before anybody shows up that I start to get seriously concerned, but soon enough, a middle-aged woman in hospital scrubs pokes her head around the dividing curtain and glances at me curiously. Apparently no one who works here appreciates any sense of urgency.  
  
“Er,” I say, my voice cracking, “Hello. I couldn’t find the call button. Can you… turn this off?”  
  
\---  
  
It isn’t long after the nurse grumpily sets the EKG machine on mute and sends an aide to get me a chilled cup of juice that a doctor knocks on the open doorway and heads over to the foot of my bed. He’s an older man, with thinning hair, a large forehead and a salt-and-pepper mustache. He spends more time looking at the clipboard in his hands than at me.  
  
“How are you feeling, Miss… Daidouji?” His voice is deep and raspy, not quite that of a smoker’s but not exactly healthy-sounding either.  
  
“I have a terrible headache,” I whisper. “Why is it that I’m here?”  
  
He raises an eyebrow at me. “Because of your congenital arrhythmia, isn’t it? Long QT…?” He glances down at the chart and shakes his head. “No, I see here that your condition is slightly different… I’m given to understand you fainted from an accident at school?”  
  
Crap, that’s right. Some girl tackled me to the ground… Why would she do that? It seems so stupid…  
  
Before I get a chance to respond, the man gruffly continues. “With your condition, any sort of strong impact to the chest can cause ventricular fibrillation…”  
  
“I remember that somebody knocked me down… I can’t remember anything after that—”  
  
“You need to be more careful,” the doctor says, cutting me off, “any sort of short, sharp shock to your heart can cause cardiac arrest.”  
  
 _I know that already._  I’ve had this condition for long enough; I don’t need this obnoxious man to give me lessons about my arrhythmia all over again. “I kn—“  
  
“This time, you happened to be lucky. Your heart rate has been relatively normal since you were checked in. It appears that after the palpitations began and you fainted, intravenous aspirin was administered and your heart slowly returned to a sustainable cardiac cycle.”  
  
They gave me aspirin after I passed out and eventually my heart decided  _not_  to fail after all. Got it. Since when does aspirin  _cause_  headaches?  
  
“That is what we call a ‘cardiac event’,” the doctor says, with all the enthusiasm of a customer service representative reading a payment history. “Had your condition worsened, we may well have had to operate, and you very well could have died, do you understand? This is why you need to be more responsible.”  
  
More  _responsible?_  
  
There’s no way I heard that right. I have to consciously prevent my jaw from dropping, though it’s not like he’s making any eye contact anyway.  
  
Is he seriously blaming the accident on  _me?_  Like it’s  _my_  fault some lunatic gored me in the hallway? _I’m being as responsible as I can!_  
  
I furrow my brow at him in consternation, my respect for him as an authority figure rapidly beginning to wane. “I don’t—“  
  
“Now, I want you to rest here for the night, so our staff can keep you under observation, but I see no reason why you should have to stay here any longer than that. You’re not currently experiencing any cardiac discomfort, are you? Any chest pain, shortness of breath, a sensation of building pressure, anything to that effect?”  
  
...  
  
...There’s pressure building, all right, but it’s not in my chest.   
  
Every time I’ve tried to speak, this doctor has immediately cut me off to reveal how poorly informed he is of my own situation. He is a patronizing, arrogant twit who visibly adores the condescension of his own voice. I see now that I never appreciated my cardiologist in Shibuya enough. There were times when she seemed impassive or imperious, but she  _always_  looked me in the eyes, and whenever I saw her she seemed genuinely concerned with my health. This man, however, only seems to see me as a problem he wants to go away.   
  
For him, it’s likely not far from the truth. It’s around the time that most hospitals do their changeovers, so I’m quite possibly the last thing standing between him and a glass of bourbon.  
  
“I’m not currently having any problems in my chest,” I say, slowly and deliberately, trying not to let the frustration seep into my voice, “however; I have an unbearable headache, I’m nauseated, and my vision is blurry.”  
  
The look of agitation on the doctor’s face as I relay these symptoms to him is obvious; no doubt he was simply waiting for me to say ‘I’m fine’ so that he could leave the room and forget about me forever. Not that he’s given me any reason to care what he wants; I already have nothing but contempt for this man, and the splitting headache I’m suffering from doesn’t make me any nicer.  
  
He stands there staring silently at my charts for a moment, methodically pulling a mechanical pencil out of his pocket before finally speaking. “Can you remember which way you fell? My report doesn’t say.”  
  
I furrow my brow at the question, but it’s hard to focus on a memory that’s barely there anymore, and my thoughts are muddled and disorganized. “I don’t remember clearly... It would have to be backwards, I guess.”  
  
“Did you land on your head?”  
  
“It’s possible?” I barely recall it as it is, and I almost certainly would have been more concerned with damage to my heart than to my head. Literally as well as metaphorically.  
  
“And your vision is blurry?”  
  
“I had to ask the nurse aide how to dial an outside line, because concentrating on the phone directory hurt too much.”  
  
He squints at me, with either suspicion or vexation, then takes an ophthalmoscope out of the pocket of his coat and gestures to it. “Mind if I take a look at your eyes?”  
  
He switches the light on before I can respond and waves it in front of my face. The light makes my eyes burn and I can only hold them for a second or two before I have to close them, but doesn’t ask me to reopen them before he puts the light back in his pocket, apparently satisfied.  
  
“What’s your name?”  
  
“What?” I blink at him, confused. “Iwanako Daidouji.”  
  
“Where do you live?”  
  
“Shibuya,” I answer, wondering why he’d ask when the information’s almost certainly in his charts.  
  
“Who is the current Prime Minister?”  
  
What? What does that have to do with anything? “Is this a test?”  
  
“Please answer the question,” he insists, not wanting to dignify me with an explanation.  
  
I do my best to contain my frustration. “Err… Shin…zo Abe, right?”  
  
“Yes. What’s your mother’s name?”  
  
“It’s… Yoshizumi.”  
  
He sighs, rapping the clipboard with the eraser end of his pencil. “Well, based on your symptoms and the circumstances, you probably have a concussion, though it doesn’t look serious.”  
  
Haha, what? It sounded like he said...  
  
“I beg your pardon?”  
  
“A concussion. You probably suffered it when you fell.”  
  
“A  _concussion?!_ ”  
  
“I can’t tell how severe it is, but to prevent further injury, you’re going to need to have plenty of rest for a few days,” he continues, unimpressed with my horror. “Having a concussion so close to a cardiac event could result in some unusual complications… Until we know for certain, I’m going to have to recommend that you remain an inpatient for at least seventy-two hours.”  
  
Three more days in this room? So much for the rest of the week…  
  
“I would have to look at your prescriptions more closely in order to know exactly how your heart medications could interact with a severe concussion… hopefully that dose of aspirin you were given doesn’t make anything worse…”  
  
“Hmm?”  
  
“You were given a fairly large dose of aspirin earlier for your heart palpitations…” He shakes his head. “Aspirin can increase the risk of bleeding after a concussion.”  
  
“What?!” I begin to feel goosebumps rising on my arms, and I start to wonder if I’m going to have  _another_  cardiac event. “You mean, like, a cerebral hemorrhage? Am I… Am I going to be all right?”  
  
“Well, first of all,  _don’t panic,_ ” the doctor says gruffly. “You’re probably fine. Most likely you’ll continue to feel nauseated for the rest of the night and much of tomorrow, but you’ve almost certainly been through the worst already. We’ll see if we need to add or subtract anything from your nightly medications and do our best to keep anything else from exacerbating your heart  _or_  your brain. But you have to stay calm.”  
  
Easy for you to say when  _you’re_  not the one who has to worry about dying in your sleep. Or having a stroke, for that matter.  
  
The doctor, who never gave me his name, asks me to get up off the bed and walk to the bathroom, which I suppose is to make sure that I haven’t wrecked any other parts of my body, or ensure my apparent concussion isn’t so bad that I’ve forgotten how to move upright. The motion only nauseates me further, and my legs feel weaker than twist ties, but eventually I’m able to make it to the sink, where I’m greeted by the disheveled nightmare of my own reflection. I take the opportunity to wash my face, and the doctor nods with some measure of satisfaction.  
  
“Good,” he says blandly. “The best treatment for a concussion is to rest, and your heart could use some as well, I’m sure. When dinner comes, try to eat  _something,_  but don’t force it down. Throw up in the toilet, if you feel the need. The nurses will come by with your medications around 8 PM.”  
  
Based on the clock on the wall, it’s just after five PM right now… I was out for most of the day.  
  
“Well, then,” he shrugs, again not letting me get a word in edgewise, “have a good evening.”  
  
 _Fat chance._  I nod speechlessly and the doctor briskly exits the room, seeming delighted to finally be done with me. I debate trying to dry heave into the hospital toilet for a few moments before deciding I haven’t really eaten anything today anyway, and return to the bed, pulling down the curtains along the way.  
  
A concussion.  
  
Three days out of the hospital, and I break yet another vital part of my body.  
  
How many more times am I going to find myself carted off to a room like this? Was this time simply a misadventure, or does it presage a more frequent series of misfortunes? Maybe once I’m discharged again, I’ll be back in only a matter of weeks. Maybe I was just deluding myself when I thought anything would change when I came to Yamaku. For all that my parents reiterated how “safe” that school would be for somebody with my condition, it certainly took no time at all for something to nearly kill me.  
  
Where in the hell  _are_  my parents, anyway? Since when does hearing one’s daughter was hospitalized not warrant some kind of reaction? Do they even  _know?_  
  
My eyes drift back over to the phone on the nightstand. Maybe if I call Mother, I’ll feel better. She’ll… she’ll have something to say to lift my spirits, I’m sure.  
  
Though trying to read the card on the phone still strains my eyes, I had the presence of mind to ask the nursing attendant how to dial an outside line, so dialing my mother’s cell phone number is merely a matter of hand-eye coordination. Ideally I’d use my own cell phone for this, but, much like the last time I collapsed, it’s gone missing.  
  
The phone rings…  
  
…and rings and rings…  
  
…and goes to voicemail. Because of  _course_  it does. Oh, well, time to leave a message.  
  
“Er, hello, Mother,” I say into the machine, feeling more than a little awkward. “I’m calling you from the hospital. There was an accident, but I’m… mostly fine now, I guess. I feel pretty sick, but they say I’ll be fine in a few days. I don’t know where my cellphone is, so if you want to call me…” I give her my extension and room number, and then hang up the phone. What a waste of time.  
  
What now? I’ve got seventy-two hours to kill. Even if I had books or movies I couldn’t read them with the headache and nausea, and even if there was anything on television remotely interesting, I’d have the same problem.  
  
No visitors to talk to, either. Not even somebody in the bed next to mine, though I’m more grateful for that than anything. I’d try calling up my friends, but I don’t really  _have_  friends, anymore. I never received the phone numbers of anyone at Yamaku, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have remembered them even if I  _didn’t_  have a concussion. I can’t really remember  _anyone’s_  phone number, other than my father’s, and there wouldn’t be any point to calling him. He doesn’t answer his calls, unless they’re from a business associate, and expects Mother to take care of everything else. Nothing short of my dangling precariously over the maw of Hell would stir him from his corporate affairs.  
  
What about my brother…?  
  
I know  _his_  number, but am I even desperate enough to try to speak with him? I haven’t seen him in over a year, and unlike father, not even my near-death in the snow was enough to tear him away from his career for even a  _moment._  Does he even care about me anymore?  
  
Resolving not to call him, I lie back down in bed, staring at the ceiling for a few minutes, trying to think about something else. I rest my head back on the pillow, covering myself in the thin blanket, and shut my eyes, trying to fall back into unconsciousness until my medication is ready.  
  
…  
  
…Well…  
  
I shift onto my right side, flipping the thin pillow over to the cooler side, and try to clear my mind and nod off. When, after an indeterminable length of time, it is painfully obvious I am  _not_  falling asleep, I shift onto my left side. This helps about as much as one would expect, so I return to a supine position, sprawling myself out all over the bed.  
  
…  
  
…This isn’t working.  
  
I’m too worked up to fall back asleep. Too medicated, too injured, too angry, too depressed, too frustrated, too scared, too sick, too uncomfortable, too hot, too cold, too bored… As much as I need rest, it’s not coming easily. I would blame it on having just woken up, but I don’t think injury-induced fainting actually results in the kind of unconsciousness you get from natural sleep. It certainly doesn’t help that this bed isn’t nearly as comfortable as the one at Yamaku or even the one I had in Shibuya.  
  
…  
  
…I’m thirsty…  
  
…  
  
…To hell with it. Fine.  
  
Pulling the phone, cradle and all, onto the bed next to me, I dial out the extension for an outside number and call my brother. It’s evening already, so if he’s going to have free time it’ll most likely be around now.  
  
What will I say to him? We haven’t spoken in ages. Maybe I shouldn’t even talk about myself, being in the hospital again and all… He might not have any interest in talking about my medical problems. Maybe that’s why he hasn’t been checking up on me, even. I could just ask him questions about how things in  _his_  life are going. Maybe we could talk about his job? His love life? What he’s been doing for fun? I don’t even care. I just want to hear a familiar voice, an affectionate voice, one that’ll make me forget how miserable I am long enough for me to pass out.  
  
The phone begins to ring. I try to breathe deeply, trying to quell the butterflies in my stomach before my heart gets any more overworked than it already is.  
  
It rings… and rings… and rings again…  
  
“Hello…”  
  
My stomach does a backflip. “H—“  
  
“…you have reached the voice mailbox of Hikaru Daidouji,” he continues, his voice deep, rich, and distinct even in the tinny recording. “Unfortunately, I’m not here to take this call. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”  
  
A robotic-sounding woman’s voice then proceeds to inform me that the ‘customer’s’ voice mailbox is full, and promptly disconnects me.  
  
…Damn you, Hikaru.  
  
I don’t know why I even bothered—  
  
 _RING—!_  
  
I nearly pirouette onto the hospital floor as the phone bursts into noise, its lighted display flashing urgently at me. It’s all I can do just to stare at it, stupefied, before I swipe at the receiver and bring it back to my face.  
  
“Hikaru?!”  
  
“Eh? No…”  
  
It’s another man’s voice, not Hikaru’s. I nearly lose the strength to grip the receiver to my ear as my heart sinks. There’s a long silence as I lie limp onto the thin mattress and ponder the richness of my disappointment.  
  
“This is Iwanako Daidouji, right?”  
  
“Y… yes,” I answer, unsure if I want to proceed forward with this red herring of a conversation. “With whom am I speaking?”  
  
The name he responds with isn’t one I recognize.  
  
“Please excuse me… I don’t know who you are.”  
  
“The Nurse, remember? From school? We spoke on Monday.”  
  
Him? What does he want? Seems a little unusual for a school nurse to call me at the hospital. The one at my old school never did, though I’m reasonably sure she had a hand involved in keeping me alive long enough for the paramedics to arrive. What’s he going to tell me that Doctor Idiot didn’t already go over?  
  
“The medical staff there filled me in on your current condition a couple minutes ago,” he continues, preempting the question I was about to ask. “In all seriousness, how are you doing?”  
  
A heretofore unknown, primal upwelling of sarcasm suddenly erupts inside me, and it takes the last splinters of my willpower to suppress the savage urge to respond with one of the thousands of snarky responses that quickly spring to mind like mushrooms on an old carcass.  
  
“I have a concussion,” I answer matter-of-factly. “I avoided having a heart attack, somehow.”  
  
“Yeah, I, uh… I heard,” he says, a sympathetic tone starting to slither into his voice. “I’m glad it wasn’t any worse. We were pretty worried.”  
  
Who’s this ‘we’?  
  
“Sorry for making you worry,” I lie. “I… I wasn’t expecting something to hit me like that.”  
  
“About that, uh…” he trails off, and I can barely hear his pained sigh through the phone. “Look, I’m really sorry about that. It’s totally unacceptable that… that happened.”  
  
If there wasn’t such a deep undercurrent of regret in his voice, I would have no doubts that this wasn’t anything more than the traditional ‘please don’t sue us’ apology call.  
  
“Well, it’s not your fault, obviously,” I say, rolling my eyes against the darkness of the hospital room. “It was… was that girl who plowed into me, not you. I have you to thank for getting me here safely, right?”  
  
I’m just assuming he came up and managed the situation after I fell unconscious, because I don’t see who else might have.  
  
“Yeah, you’re welcome, but it still never should have happened in the first place,” he replies, his voice more serious-sounding than usual. “this was… something of a wake-up call for some of us. Believe me, it will  _never_ happen again.”  
  
It will never happen again…  
  
It kind of startles me how little I care for this apology, how little a consolation I find this.   
  
Even  _if_  nobody ever runs through the halls, even if nobody ever hits me in the chest, nothing’s ever going to be the same again. The major appeal of Yamaku was how ‘safe’ it was supposed to be. It was the feeling of normality I was supposed to get back, the idea that I could sink into a sense of complacency and not worry too much about whether the wrong turn was suddenly going to plunge me into disaster. Now, I’ll never have that sense of complacency again. Even if the hallway is a safe place from now on, I’ll never be able to turn that corner without feeling a pang of fear. I’m never going to  _feel_  safe.  
  
And the  _other_  major appeal of the school? The idea of a fresh start? So much for  _that._  I know the pathology of a rumor intimately well. Seventy-two hours from now, when I finally get back to class, there won’t be a single person there who  _won’t_  know about my heart condition. A lack of substantiated details will only intensify the speculation. When I finally get discharged from the hospital, nobody will act the same… People won’t treat me like I’m a normal person. I’ll just get more of the same dull, apologetic expressions my classmates rained down on me when they swarmed my hospital room after my operation. More of the cringeworthy smalltalk that never felt sincere, no matter how hard we tried to pretend things were all right.  
  
So, to Hell with it. It’s over. There’s nothing else to say.  
  
 _I don’t care to hear any of this…_  
  
“…Daidouji? Are you still there?”  
  
“Yes. I’m just… I’m just tired,” I lie.  
  
“Look, I want to give you a chance to rest, there’s just one thing I need from you.”  
  
“Mmhmm?”  
  
“Other than their cell phones, is there any other way to contact your parents? We haven’t been able to get ahold of them yet.”  
  
…So my parents don’t even know I was rehospitalized…  
  
“I’m sorry, I can’t help you,” I reply. “My mother usually answers her phone. I can’t imagine why she wouldn’t pick up this time.”  
  
“And your father?”  
  
“My father’s generally unreachable. I can count the number of times he’s picked up the phone on one hand,” I answer morosely. “I’d say email was more reliable, but it’ll probably get waylaid by his spam filter.”  
  
Another sigh. “I see,” he says, another unwanted note of sympathy reaching his words. “That’s… unfortunate. Well, I suppose I’ll continue trying to contact them until I get an answer. We have to make sure they know about this incident.”  
  
“I figured…”  
  
There’s another lull in the conversation as the nurse seems to contemplate what he wants to say next. I’m already beginning to feel as though our discussion is over, so I ease my eyes shut and try to force myself to relax.  
  
“…Daidouji, would you mind if I asked a somewhat personal question?”  
  
I  _would,_  but… “…What is it?”  
  
“Are you doing all right, emotionally? I can imagine that what happened today may have been frightening.”  
  
So, you’re concerned about my mental health…  
  
 _Of course_  it was frightening. Death  _is_  frightening, it’s terrifying. But more than that, it was  _depressing._  I was taken completely out of control. That girl, whoever she was, may not have intentionally attacked me, but she showed me just how helpless I really am. She illustrated how easy it would be for anybody to just take me out of existence entirely. I feel battered, and violated, and shaken. If she had managed to hit me just a little harder, or had hit me somewhere other than in the school, I… I just wouldn’t be here right now.  
  
But the nurse doesn’t need to know any of that. It’s not like he can fix me.  
  
“I’m fine,” I answer, my voice neutral. “I don’t need to speak to a therapist, if that’s what you’re asking.”  
  
“Well,” the nurse replies softly, “I’m glad to hear that. Just… keep in mind that if you want to talk, there are people here for you. I know it’s not always easy adjusting to living with a heart condition...”  
  
“I appreciate that, but really, I’ll be okay,” I lie.  
  
“Good,” he answers, apparently content to let the matter drop. “One more thing, Daidouji; we have your belongings stored here in my office. Would you like me to have somebody drop them off tonight? By now, I thought I would have been able to send them over with your parents, but since I don’t know where they are…”  
  
“Please, if it’s no trouble,” I answer, more than a little relieved to hear that my things are safe and sound. At least it’ll make my stay here a bit less agonizing. “I appreciate it.”  
  
“Sure thing. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”  
  
If I didn’t have a concussion, I’d ask for my DVD player, but…  
  
“I don’t think there’s anything, thanks.”  
  
“All right, well, I’ll let you get some rest. Concussions are rough—I’ve had one myself—but as long as you get a lot of sleep and don’t get hit again, you’ll be good as new.”  
  
“Hopefully…”  
  
He gives me a cell phone number to call in case I need him for anything, then we say our farewells and I hang up.  
  
The next hour passes in relative silence, other than the hum of the air conditioner and the footsteps of medical staff trolling through the hallway. Lying in bed for so long begins to feel painful, so eventually I get up off the bed and wander around the room. My head swims and my temples pulse angrily when I sit up, but it feels all right to stretch out for a few minutes and clear my head.  
  
Even if I wanted to walk out into the hallway (there’s never much to see,) I don’t know where my clothes are, and all I’m wearing is a hospital gown, so that’s completely out of the question. It isn’t too long before my meager reserves of energy are completely depleted and I return to the dubious comforts of the bed, finishing the remainder of the juice the nurse brought me and putting myself in a sort of half-awake trance until dinner is served.  
  
Meal request forms would have gone out in the morning, before I was admitted, so I already know I’ll have no say in whatever they serve me, but I’m feeling too nauseated to eat much anyway, so it’s nothing to cry over. It winds up being tonkatsu, which isn’t a meal I generally have a problem with, even in hospitals, but I barely nibble on it, focusing most of my efforts on the miso soup and shredded cabbage served with it. I suspect I may not be able to keep this down until dawn, but I’ll have to cross that bridge when I come to it.  
  
I’m partaking in my dessert, a surprisingly refreshing cup of Italian ice, when I hear someone knocking on the door to my room.  
  
“Yes? Come in.”  
  
“…Daidouji?”  
  
“Here, behind the curtain. I’m decent.”  
  
I’m more than a little surprised to see who emerges; it’s Mutou, of all people.  
  
“Oh! Teacher, I wasn’t expecting you.”  
  
It’s an uncomfortable feeling, having my teacher around when I’m in bed wearing practically nothing. Well, not only that, but I look like a total mess, as well. I feel embarrassed and exposed. It’s a feeling I’ve had a lot in the past few months.  
  
Mutou seems to pick up on my discomfort, and keeps his eyes off me in an attempt at amelioration. Though it’s almost 7 PM, he’s still wearing the brown suit he wore this morning. Has he been at school all day?  
  
“I’m glad to see that you’re all right, Daidouji.”  
  
I stare blankly at him for a moment, trying to figure out the most polite response. I settle on a simple “Thank you.”  
  
He holds up a navy blue duffel bag and gingerly sets it down on the floor beside the bed. “The nurse asked me if I might come by and drop off some of your things on the way home. I have them here…”  
  
I don’t own a bag like that, so I look to him askance.  
  
“You can return the duffel bag to the nurse when you come back to school,” he says, preempting my question. “He packed a P.E. uniform as well, so that you at least have some comfortable clothing while you’re here.”  
  
“That was thoughtful of him,” I say, genuinely grateful. I would have gone crazy if I had to wear this gown for three days. Undoubtedly my school uniform is tucked away somewhere on this floor, but I certainly wouldn’t want to lie down all day in it. “I really appreciate it.”  
  
He nods stoically. The awkwardness in the room is palpable, and I find myself torn between a sense of relief from having my belongings returned to me and a sense of anxiety from being alone with my teacher outside of school, justifiable context notwithstanding. Maybe I’m just not thinking straight right now…  
  
“I hope you don’t mind, but I had Hakamichi gather the rest of the week’s assignments from the other teachers,” he continues. “Your main priority should be recovery, of course, but with exams coming up, we wouldn’t want you to fall further behind than you already are.”  
  
School work… I have to take a sip from my already-cold tea to conceal my chagrined expression. It’s not like I have anything better to do, but…  
  
“Ah, thank you for that,” I say with feigned sincerity. “Hopefully… hopefully my concussion doesn’t preclude me from taking a look at them.”  
  
His face has a brief flash of disapproval, and he turns back to face me, his eyes meeting my own. “Daidouji… do you think you’re taking full advantage of the opportunities you have available?”  
  
Eh? What’s this, all of a sudden?  
  
“I don’t understand what you mean.”  
  
“We try our best at Yamaku to prepare you for life, to help you know your limits and learn how to work around them. But if you just give up every time you suffer a setback, you’re making light of the time, effort, and money people have put in to make sure that you and every other student at school can have the same level of education as your peers.”  
  
…Really? He’s lecturing me, as I lie on a hospital bed, about being lazy? I don’t want to deal with this…  
  
“I’m sorry if I’ve given off the impression that I’m ungrateful,” I say, as sweetly as possible under the circumstances. “This has been… a tough year for me, and I know I haven’t been at my best.”  
  
Though I hold out hope that this is sufficient to put the topic to rest, Mutou closes his eyes in frustration, apparently too experienced as a teacher to fall for my saccharine attempt at acquiescence.  
  
“Daidouji, when you have so many people trying to help you overcome your challenges, don’t you think it’s selfish to avoid confronting them entirely?”  
  
…Selfish?  
  
I nearly died today, I could die tomorrow for all I know, and my reticence to study is selfish?  
  
What bright, shining future awaits me if I do your blasted coursework, Mutou? What’s the grand payoff? Life in a cubicle? Staying up to meet deadlines and hoping it doesn’t make my heart die? Watching my friends fall in love and knowing I’ll never have anything like that for myself? Is  _that_  what you expect me to work towards?  
  
You want to talk about  _selfishness?_  Trying to delude me into thinking any of this is worth a damn, just to keep me playing along, is selfish.  
  
Of course, I don’t actually say any of that.  
  
“I do think so,” I say, trying to sound apologetic. “I suppose I  _have_  been too lethargic. I’ll try to be more proactive from now on.”  
  
It’s completely insincere, but this time my words seem to breach Mutou’s cynicism, and he nods with an air of satisfaction.  
  
“Well then,” he continues, “I hope you feel better. Hopefully you’ll get out in time to enjoy the Festival.”  
  
“Yes…”  
  
“What would you like me to say, if any of your classmates ask if they can visit you?”  
  
“Are you asking me if they have my permission?”  
  
“Yes. I believe most of them have already figured out you’ve been admitted here.”  
  
Not that it takes a genius…  
  
I have mixed feelings about the prospect of receiving visitors; on one hand, I think I’d certainly be in a better mood if my parents were around, but with that apparently out of the question for the time being, it would be nice to have  _anyone_  to talk to. On the other, I hate being seen when I’m at my worst, and forcing myself to be polite.  
  
“…Please, no class projects.”  
  
“I’m sorry?”  
  
“No cards or balloons or anything. If somebody wants to come out and see me, feel free to tell them my room number, but if they’re just going to make some trite gesture of sympathy, I already have more than I need…”  
  
As soon as the words leave my mouth, I realize how brusque they are, and I feel a mild pang of guilt as Mutou furrows his brow at me. This concussion must be affecting me more than I’m aware…  
  
“Er, I’m sorry, that didn’t come out right…”  
  
“It’s fine,” he says, his eyes tired. “I understand what you mean. I’ll keep that in mind.”  
  
“Thank you. And thank you again for bringing me my things.”  
  
“You’re welcome,” he says, glancing at his watch. “I hope to see you in class on Monday morning.”  
  
“I do, too.”  
  
As soon as he leaves, I feel a palpable sense of relief. It isn’t that I  _dislike_  my homeroom teacher, especially when his heart seems to be in the right place, but I always feel tense around him anyway. He’s… very socially awkward. It doesn’t help that he teaches a subject that I loathe with every fiber of my being.  
  
\---  
  
It isn’t too long before a member of the hospital staff comes in and takes away my dinner tray, and not too long after that, a nurse comes in with my nightly medications and a glass of water. Though the doctor I spoke to earlier said he was going to review my prescriptions, it seems he didn’t change a thing; I can’t yet recognize the medications I take by sight, but I swallow the same number of tablets I always do. I’m just going to have to take it on his word that they won’t cause me to have an explosive brain hemorrhage.  
  
If it wasn’t so frustrating, it would be fascinating how having a chronic medical condition affects the tone of every other mishap that can potentially affect one’s health. For example, I’ve been just barely able to resist the pressure to vomit since I wound up in the hospital. I’ve just now taken my nightly heart medications, which I need to survive. If I  _do_  vomit, does that mean I have to take my medications all over again? Am I increasing the risk that I could suffer a heart attack? If I have to take more pills, who pays for those? If I’ve metabolized  _some_  of the medication, but thrown up the rest, do I risk overdosing?  
  
Maybe I’m overthinking things, but it’s not like there’s anything else to do in a hospital room at eight o’clock at night.  
  
Just a week ago, I would have been sitting up in a bed like this, too, but it’s impressive how much change even a few days makes. As recently as five days ago, I was completely emotionally numb, worn out from grieving, and completely isolated from literally everyone in my life. And, though the epiphany I had on Saturday—and the resolution that accompanied it—is already well on its way to wearing out its welcome, it's still affecting the way I would approach a situation that I’m otherwise familiar with.  
  
I can’t seem to find my way back to that trance, that stupor I was in before. Two-and-a-half days spent back in a school setting, with people my age to talk to and actual expectations to fulfill, was all it took for me to completely forget how to deal with the empty, sterile loneliness of a hospitalization. The silver lining, of course, is that I’m only supposed to be here for a few days. Even if my prospects aren’t anywhere as near as inspiring as they seemed before this, anything’s better than a hospital room.  
  
Since it doesn’t look like there’s going to be any more excitement for the rest of the night, and a fresh brain injury isn’t conducive to contemplating one’s problems anyway, I decide to try sleeping again. My head is still swimming, but hopefully I’m tired enough to make it through to unconsciousness.  
  
I rest my head against the pillow, and after making a concerted effort to clear my head, I finally manage to drift off to sleep.  
  
\---  
  
I’m in the middle of some kind of inscrutable dream when the shrill  _ring ring ring_  of the telephone nearly scares me off the bed. I literally gasp as I shoot upright and almost have a panic attack before I realize I’m awake.  
  
I get a glance at the clock on the wall before I locate the telephone receiver—it’s almost one in the morning. Who in god’s name would call me this late?! I’m tempted to leave the phone alone, but it doesn’t stop ringing.  
  
“Hello?”  
  
There’s a lot of commotion on the other end. It sounds like there’s a lot of people, and some kind of music, as well. My heart pulses loudly in my chest from the unexpected surprise, and my headache practically roars from the sudden exertion of waking up.  
  
“Honey, is that you?”  
  
“Mom?!” Even as sick and groggy as I am, I’m still unable to contain my surprise. Where has she been? Why is she calling now? Is she coming here?  
  
“I just now checked my voicemails. Are you all right? You didn’t have another heart attack, did you?”  
  
“No, I didn’t, but—“  
  
“Whew! I was so worried. They made it sound as though something terrible had happened.”  
  
I decide to let the interruption slide for the moment. “Mom, where are you? Why are you calling me at one in the morning?”  
  
“Oh! I’m sorry, honey. I completely forgot about time zones.”  
  
 _“Time zones?!_  What are you talking about?! Where are you?”  
  
“Oh, I’m in Prague with Kimichan, her husband, and some friends.”  
  
 _…What?_  
  
No, no, I  _know_  I didn’t hear that right. That would be absolutely ridiculous.   
  
 _“Prague?_  You mean, like… in Czechoslovakia?”  
  
“The Czech Republic!” she chirps helpfully. “You have no idea how beautiful it is out here. I wish you could have come along…”  
  
Oh my god. She’s serious, isn’t she? I…  
  
“That, uh, b, but, you, I—” I stammer, tongue-tied, too flabbergasted to articulate a question. “But—wait, wait.  _Why_  are you in… in Prague?”  
  
“It’s a vacation! We’re sightseeing,” she says happily.  
  
A  _vacation?_  From  _what?_  From the job that you’ve never had?  
  
“Why… why…” I struggle to keep my voice level, trying to suppress the urge to shout angrily at my mother. “Why didn’t you think to  _tell me_  this? Or  _anybody?_ ”  
  
“Oh, well, it was on very short notice,” she answers matter-of-factly. “Miss Koyama was going to come, but she had a family emergency, so they asked if I would like to go instead. I talked about it with your father, but I just thought you would be too busy starting school again and everything… You don’t need me, do you? Everything’s okay, isn’t it?”  
  
For a moment, I’m too overwhelmed to answer. Well, that’s not really true. I’m too busy willing myself not to scream at the top of my lungs to answer.  
  
“Mom,” I say, with every ounce of self-control I can muster, “I have. A concussion.”  
  
“A concussion? I thought that was a head injury?”  
  
“It  _is,”_  I say, trying not to growl it into the phone. “I hit my head when I fell. When a girl crashed into me.”  
  
“Ohhh… my poor baby,” she says, with vapid, if maternal, sympathy. “But you’ll be all right, won’t you? I mean, athletes get them all the time, right? Didn’t Hikaru get one once?”  
  
“I don’t think—“  
  
“Don’t worry, I’m sure everything will be all right,” she says nonchalantly. “You worry too much, honey. Just focus on school and making friends, and these problems will go away.”  
  
“But—“  
  
“I have to go now, but I’ll call you soon. I’ll bring you back something, okay? Maybe a necklace or some clothes… It’ll be a surprise!”  
  
“Wait—“  
  
“I love you, dear.”  
  
I sigh. “I love you too, mom.”  
  
There’s a telltale click, and the phone goes silent.  
  
She’s always been like this… I shouldn’t be surprised…  
  
That’s what I tell myself, but I fear tears of frustration welling up in my eyes anyway.  
  
Was her earlier concern for me, for my emotional well-being, just a game to her? Whatever happened to being there for me when I needed her? Did she think buying me a new wardrobe and sending me to boarding school was all it was going to take for me to stop being a problem and for her to resume her frivolous lifestyle? Did she even listen to any of the school’s voicemails, or did she delete them all?  
  
I just can’t believe it. I’m lying here alone in the darkness, nursing a headache that never seems to end, and my mother’s touring Europe, completely oblivious to the crisis I’m going through. The one person I should be counting on to provide me emotional support, and all I get are a couple of half-baked, ignorant platitudes in the middle of the night. My mother ran off to party with her friends as soon as I stopped being an imminent problem in her mind.  
  
My father is perennially unavailable, my brother’s missing in action, and my mom can’t even be trusted to let people know before she darts off to go globetrotting.  
  
It’s not as though there’s anybody else, either. I’m estranged from every friend I’ve ever had, and I’m making new ones at such a leaden pace that I may as well not even bother.  
  
And I guess that’s the moral of the story. That, even after a disaster happens, nobody’s really going to be there for me, not in the way I really need. All I have is myself. Maybe forever.  
  
It’s a bitter truth, but it’s one I’m going to have to accept.  
  
As the nausea rises, I have to shove myself off the bed, rushing over to the toilet and spending the next few minutes haphazardly vomiting. When I’m finally done, I collapse onto the cold floor of the hospital bathroom and lean tiredly against a wall. I spend almost fifteen minutes there, just sitting in the cool darkness, listening to the air conditioner hum.  
  
I hope this is rock bottom.


	12. Báthory in Her Castle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Look hard enough, push hard enough, and one will see that everyone has a dark side.

I know I survived the night because I can feel the needle. That is to say, the one in my arm.  
  
Opening my eyes, I’m greeted by a familiar expression on an unfamiliar face: that of a bored nurse trying to collect blood from somebody without too much fuss. I wish I could say that this is the first time I’ve ever woken up this way, but if I’m being perfectly honest it’s more like the twentieth; I can’t even feign surprise at this point. People tend to assume I’m trypanophobic, which I’ve always found more than a little insulting.  
  
“Good morning,” the nurse murmurs to me once she realizes I’m awake. “I’m just drawing blood for a test.”  
  
“I noticed…”  
  
“There, done,” she says, twisting off the vacutainer and discarding it. “You can go back to sleep, if you like.”  
  
As if I needed permission…  
  
Without so much as a moment of eye contact, she hands me my morning medications and a glass of water, waits for me to swallow them down, and exits the room. Glancing over to the clock, I can see that it’s a little after six. Breakfast will probably be served in the next half hour, barring some kind of calamity.  
  
My vision has cleared up, and the nausea apparently faded, though I’m wary of a recurrence. My head still throbs faintly, however, and despite sleeping fairly soundly last night, I still feel profoundly exhausted. Whether that’s an effect of the concussion or the heart medication—or both—is nothing but a pedantic distinction at this point. I  _am_  hungry though, no doubt owing to my having completely vacated the contents of my stomach a few hours ago.  
  
God… My mother. Damn it…  
  
Weary as I am, it hasn’t stopped me from being furious with her. How a person can be as utterly clueless as she is I have no idea, but I really, honestly believed for a moment that the single saving grace of my nascent heart problems was that she was going to start considering my feelings. Maybe throwing money at me and packing me in a proverbial polystyrene cage is all she knows how to do. Nobody ever accused her of having a broad skillset.  
  
Would I be happier if she spent most of her time worrying about me? If she was plagued with nightmares about my coming to harm, or worse? If she began to panic if she went more than a few days without hearing from me? No, I can imagine I’d find that pretty stifling, bordering on obnoxious. Then again, there’s more than a bit of middle ground between that and absconding to carouse in Europe as soon as your daughter is out of the hospital.  
  
I don’t think ill of her—she’s a happy person, has almost always been a happy person, and if she ever slowed down, I think I’d be more than a little troubled—and she’s basically all I have, anyway, but there’s no denying that last night she failed on all counts. Her only job was to be my mother and she couldn’t even be bothered to show up. And the really,  _really_  aggravating part of all of this is that I should have seen it coming from ten kilometers off.  
  
But I have to stop thinking about this, because I’m just going to grow more miserable than I already am. She’s never going to change, and I’m never going to be strong enough to reject her, so even sulking over it is an exercise in futility.  
  
Before I’m even able to consider trying to go back to sleep, a nursing aide comes in with breakfast, so I spend the better part of the next hour distracting myself with that.  
  
Though I'm pretty sure hospital eggs are freeze-dried, I actually had a bit of a craving for tamagoyaki, so it’s slightly disappointing to be greeted with a bland-looking western-style breakfast. Cornflakes, orange juice, and toast—not what I would have asked for, if the choice ever came up, but it’s all edible. At least there’s coffee here, but the dirty little secret of every hospital is that, unless it came from the employee lounge, it’s probably decaffeinated. Hospital coffee is powered by the placebo effect.  
  
Strangely enough, I have more of an appetite this morning than I’ve had since I was discharged from the previous hospital, and I hungrily devour the majority of the offerings. Afterwards, though, as I try to get up off the bed to go to the restroom, I'm suddenly struck by a rush of dizziness that forces me to grab onto a guardrail for balance. I have to take a moment to clear my head before I feel comfortable proceeding, after which I head to the bathroom to wash my face.  
  
I catch a glimpse of myself in the stainless steel mirror. I still look like a corpse. A fresh corpse, maybe, like one of the glassy-eyed cadavers in those Victorian  _memento mori_  daguerreotypes, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say I look  _alive_. Part of me wants to put on makeup, but there’s no point when you’re confined to a hospital like this.  
  
Actually, my mother would disagree. Hikaru told me once that, back when she was pregnant with me, as soon as she realized she was about to go into labor, she got dressed in something presentable and went to the bathroom to touch up her makeup for forty-five minutes before finally getting in my father’s car to go to the hospital. It’s one of those stories that would seem perfectly absurd unless you were acquainted with her.  
  
…Okay, I  _seriously_  need to stop thinking about her. I’m going to go crazy if this keeps up.  
  
The hospital gown I’m wearing feels gross and uncomfortable—I want to change it out for the P.E. uniform Mutou brought over, but first what I really need is a shower. All of my nice bathing supplies are still in my dorm room, but that obviously can’t be helped. If I can’t be happy, at least I can be clean.  
  
I flag down a nursing aide and inform her of my plans; after getting me some micro bottles of soap and a clean towel from the supply closet, she leads me to the shower room on this floor and lets me be.  
  
The shower is pretty much what I expected to be: successful, but not particularly satisfying. The water is tepid at best, and can’t be coerced to get any hotter. I soak in it just long enough to get myself clean and turn the water off, which immediately seems to cause me to freeze solid. All in all, this morning doesn’t seem to be getting off to a great start. Skipping school really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  
  
Mutou’s class is going on right now, I suppose. When you’re stuck in a hospital like this, it can be hard to remember that time passes outside, that your classmates are attending lessons and making memories you’re not a part of. Time never moves in here, so it’s always a little hard for me to remember it still goes on elsewhere. I was discharged from the hospital on a Saturday, but the only reason I know that is because I started school on Monday. Prior to that, I hadn’t known what day it was for months.  
  
Consequently, it’s still hard for me to think about the time that passed while I was recovering from my heart attack; to think about how, the morning after I collapsed in the snow, class would have started normally and homework would have been turned in. Maybe in that first month I would have occasionally been on some people’s minds, but it would never have gone any further than that. Even the Tea & Ikebana club would have been fine without me. I may have been the vice president, but in practice that really didn’t mean a whole lot unless the president went absent.  
  
Hisao, too, still has his longtime posse of loyal friends: Shin, Takumi, and Mai, who was our one mutual friend. I’m sure they wouldn’t have let him dwell on me, assuming he was inclined to dwell at all. His life is probably normal again.  
  
Mai’s the only one I worry at all about. Our friendship was probably always destined to end once I had my heart attack, but I never got a chance to reassure her that she did nothing to trigger it. She may have persuaded me to act on the feelings I had for Hisao, and facilitated my confession, but she couldn’t have known it would have the consequences it did.  
  
I could always fix that, I guess. I feel like a phone conversation would be too awkward, after all this time, but I don’t know… Maybe I could send a letter.  
  
On the other hand, Mai was always bullheaded and strong-willed. She probably isn’t the kind of person to assume the blame for that kind of thing, and if I presumed she did, she would most likely consider the gesture arrogant or insulting. I don’t know if I could write a letter subtle enough to seem apologetic one way or the other. I probably  _should_  apologize for the frosty way I received her the last time we spoke, but if I know Mai, she’s completely forgotten about it by now.  
  
I shouldn’t be living in the past, anyway. It’s only going to make me more unhappy, and the only person really affected by it is me.  
  
An unwelcome discovery awaits me when I open up the duffel bag Mutou brought over. I find the bloomers and T-shirt easily enough, but after a few moments of increasingly frantic searching, I realize that the Nurse _never packed a tracksuit._  There’s just a summer uniform in here. That’s just great; nothing like totally bare legs in a freezing cold hospital.  
  
Whatever. I throw on what little clothing I have available, discard the hospital gown and make my way back to my room, feeling more than a little wobbly but managing to stay upright. I’m sure I look bizarre, walking down the hallway in my bloomers and hospital slippers, but I’m past the point of caring. I tumble back onto the bed and quickly wrap myself back in the covers.  
  
There isn’t anything to do until lunch—daytime television is enough of a headache  _without_  a concussion—so, after lying in bed and staring at the ceiling for a while, I finally cave and dig through the homework Mutou brought over. I don’t plan to  _do_  any of it, at least not for the time being, but maybe there’s something I could read, like my history textbook. In my experience, so long as there’s absolutely  _nothing_  else to do, reading a history textbook cover to cover is a decent way to pass the time. I actually enjoy watching historical documentaries, but the way the subject is presented in textbooks generally borders on criminal.  
  
There aren’t any textbooks here, though, just handouts, and the most interesting of them is an assignment for Miyagi’s class with three paragraphs in English about the Golden Gate Bridge. Not a particularly challenging one, either, as I understand it all completely in a single pass. People tell me that Miyagi is a tough teacher, but I think she could stand to be a little tougher. Though, really, the problem is that I accidentally became fluent.  
  
I stare at the handouts for a while, though I avoid the chemistry homework entirely—if there’s any subject that’s liable to give me a stroke, that’s the one. Eventually I cave, and ask a nursing aide if there aren’t any newspapers lying around. She winds up bringing me a paper from yesterday with several sections missing. I count my lucky stars that it’s still readable.  
  
Eventually lunch is served, and it’s pretty much elementary school-style: a milk carton, some slices of watermelon, curry on rice, and a salad. As soon as I see it, I immediately know it’s going to be the high point of my day. I eat it with great relish, taking as much time to eat as possible since I know I’m going to go back to doing nothing as soon as I’m finished.  
  
When a nurse aide comes into the doorway, I initially think it’s to ask for the fifth time if I’m done with my meal, but instead she asks me if I’m in the mood for a visitor.  
  
“I have visitors?”  
  
“Yes, there are two people here to see you.”  
  
 _What…?_  
  
Not my parents—Father wouldn’t visit me on a weekday, and Mother couldn’t get back from Europe that fast even if she were so inclined. Not any students, either, since school is still in session. Shizune and Misha might have the ability to sneak away, but I doubt they’d abuse it for my sake. It has to be members of the faculty. Nobody else would know where I was or have any cause to come see me.  
  
“You can send them in,” I say calmly. I’m not really in the mood to speak to officials from the school, but I’ll probably have to get this over with sooner or later.  
  
“Very well,” the aide says, stepping out of sight. I’m still sitting on the edge of the bed; as I silently take a moment to debate whether or not I should be sitting or standing, I hear a woman’s voice say “I’ll wait out here” from behind the doorway. I watch the entrance curiously, waiting from behind my overbed table like a company president at his desk, my office in the middle of nowhere.  
  
To my slight confusion, it's a girl my age who winds up walking into the room, making a weird clicking sound as she carefully takes a few steps inside—it’s like wearing taps or something. She's semi-formally dressed, in a blouse and skirt, strangely reminiscent of the way my parents looked on Saturday, as though I'm somebody you can only speak to in business casual. She appears to be around my height, maybe a little shorter, with a cherubic face and fine, strawberry blonde hair held up in twintails.  
  
I haven’t the slightest idea who this is. My eyes meet hers...  
  
…!  
  
…With a flash of alarming clarity, my entire body goes rigid with tension.  
  
The rich, vibrant forest green color of her eyes might strike me as beautiful under other circumstances, but here, now, they arouse memories I’d thought I was lucky enough to have forgotten. Memories of the darkness closing in, the pounding in my chest and my certainty that I was going to die… Thinking that in a single moment, any chance I’d ever have of achieving anything was ripped away from me…  
  
This girl is the reason I felt that way. She’s the reason I’m here. The would-be Destroyer of my World.  
  
I don’t know what she’s doing here. I can probably come up with a few ideas. But one thing I know for sure is that seeing her here makes the bile rise to the back of my throat.  
  
"I... er, we've never been formally introduced," she says, before I can acknowledge her verbally. "My name is Emi Ibarazaki. I'm in class 3-4… I'm sorry I'm meeting you like this…"  
  
She bows, then stands there for a moment, her hand going to the back of her head, overwhelmed by the awkwardness of the encounter. For my part, I can't think of anything to say. Well, that's not correct. I can't think of anything  _appropriate_  to say. I want to  _scream_  at her. Just having her near me is causing my heart rate to quicken. I’m so furious with her—so overwhelmed—that only a well-drilled sense of propriety is restraining me.  
  
My hands begin to tremble, and I have to fold them in my lap to conceal them. I manage to keep my face an expressionless mask, because I don’t know what emotions are liable to rise to the surface if I don’t actively suppress them.  
  
“I’m Iwanako Daidouji, but I suppose you know that already,” I answer coolly. Though I never decided to stand up—this meeting is starting off highly informal and is most likely going downhill from there—I  _do_ remember my manners, for whatever that’s worth anymore, bowing my head slightly in her direction.  
  
She pauses, glancing at the linoleum nervously, as I continue to observe her with what I can only imagine are cold, steel eyes. I can tell I’m probably making her uncomfortable, but I don’t care. My headache is starting to buzz into focus again, as though loudly resonating in the presence of the person who created it, and if  _I_  have to be miserable and uncomfortable, then I don’t at all care how happy she is.  
  
Finally she makes eye contact again. “I—look,” she says a little more resolutely, “I’m really… I’m glad that you’re okay.”  
  
That word.  _‘Okay.’_  I almost guffaw.  
  
I’m starting to hate that word, the ubiquitous, weaselly adjective that seems to follow me around like goldfish feces.  _‘Okay,’_  as if the fact that I’m not room temperature means that nothing she did was that big a deal. I don’t have traumatic brain damage, so I’m  _‘Okay.’_  It’s a word predicated on a self-aggrandizing lie.  
  
Of course, I don’t actually say any of that. But maybe I should.  
  
“…Thank you,” I say, my voice soft yet deliberate, like a leak in a pneumatic machine.  
  
Her expression is noticeably penitent, and I can see her eyes starting to become nacreous, like yesterday, when I was on the ground and it was starting to dawn on her how doomed she was.  
  
“If anything had happened, it… No, this  _is_  the worst thing I’ve ever done.”  
  
I furrow my brow silently.  
  
“People… are always reminding me not to run into the halls, and I’ve never listened.”  
  
My hands clench, and I can feel my heart start to pound heavily in my chest.  
  
“I… last year, I even had a close call with a guy with brittle bone disease, and even then, I ignored it. I just kept running in the halls when I was running late. I knew there was a chance something like this could happen, and I just kept going…”  
  
Ignored it?  
  
Are you  _kidding_  me?  
  
 _Go to hell!  
  
This_  is your stupid apology?! You knew the risks but since it wasn’t  _your_  neck on the line you dashed around like a moron anyway? And  _now_  you want me to forgive you?  
  
No more apologies. My cup runneth over with goddamned apologies. What I want is for this pressure inside me to go away. I want this anger to die… I’ve been restraining myself for so long and the sight of this girl makes it  _so. hard…!_  
  
Even now, I can’t say anything as she continues on through her inane speech. I can just stare at the table, stare at the empty lunch tray, at the crumbs on the plate, anything to take my mind off of what I’m feeling…  
  
“I’m in huge trouble at school now… I,” she stammers, her face lachrymose. “I’ve been suspended from school, forbidden to attend the Yamaku Festival, and ordered off the track team. They told me that if this happens again, I’ll be considered for expulsion… So… basically, everything that could go wrong for me, did.”  
  
She pauses, as though waiting for me to respond, but I continue to glance away. So she was punished. She probably deserved to be punished. Does she want my sympathy? Does she want  _me_  to apologize?  
  
“I… I’m really not good at these,” she finally continues. “This is… this is the first time I’ve ever screwed up this badly. What I’m trying to say is… I’m really, really sorry. For all of this.”  
  
I manage to meet her eyes again; her expression is understandably contrite, her facial features beautiful in sort of this nebulously vulpine way, but despite all this presentation I find myself almost entirely unmoved. Maybe it’s the fact that I could have telegraphed this encounter from leagues away, maybe it’s the looming suspicion that this girl routinely gets away with murder, maybe it’s that I’m just so damned sick of always being the one at a disadvantage in these conversations, but I’m not any less angry at all. In fact, I’ve been continuously on edge since she stepped through the doorway.  
  
She searches my eyes hopefully for some kind of reply, and though I’m mostly too weary to answer, too lost in my own thoughts, the pregnant silence that passes between us tells me pretty clearly that she won’t go away until I come up with some kind of response.  
  
“Fine,” I say, my voice solemn. “You’re sorry.”  
  
It’s probably the rudest thing I’ve said in ages, something that makes her search my face with surprise, and her forehead wrinkles with concern.  
  
“I, er,” she stammers, thrown off by my terse reply, “I want to make it up to you…”  
  
“Don’t.”  
  
“Huh?”  
  
“Don’t try to fix this,” I answer flatly, my tone level and steady. “Just put it behind you and move on.”  
  
She pauses, clearly beginning to get agitated. “No, look, really, I’d—”  
  
There’s a flash of color behind the doorway, and as I look up I realize I’d forgotten about the other person the nursing aide said had came to visit me. Though it should have become obvious who the woman was, I was too distracted to see it until now.  
  
 _It’s her mother…_  
  
The back of my neck is starting to burn up, and I can feel my pulse throbbing in my wrists.   
  
 _My mother is off somewhere completely ignoring me while hers is here to provide emotional support for this asinine goddamned apology. My family has completely disappeared and the person who did this to me still has hers all ready to go._  
  
It’s at this moment, amidst this unexpected rush of jealousy and anger, that the very last of my overtaxed restraint crumbles away. It’s at this moment that I lose control entirely.  
  
“—really like to make things better here—”  
  
 _“Look,”_  I practically snarl, “What the  _hell_  is it you  _want from me?!”_  
  
Her eyes widen, and she jerks back from surprise. “What—”  
  
“Is it  _forgiveness?_  You may as well hit the road, because that’s never going to happen. Do you seriously think I’m  _okay?_  You  _nearly killed me,_  do you understand that? Why the hell would I  _ever_  forgive you for that? I’m not the goddamned Pope. I don’t have to grant you a tabula rasa just because you only  _almost_  ruined my whole goddamn life.”  
  
She pales noticeably, taking a step back. “I—”  
  
“And you’re seriously telling me that this isn’t even the first time that this has happened? You go to a school for the disabled and you just, what, ignored a dozen warnings? What kind of freaking idiot  _are_  you? Sure, you’re remorseful. Good for you. I don’t  _give a damn._  How are you any different from some drunk driver who only feels bad after he finally spins out and  _murders_  half a family?”  
  
She makes a noise that’s somewhere between a gasp and a sob, as though I’ve touched upon a particularly sensitive spot, but I’m too far gone to stop now. My heart is racing and I can feel my face turning crimson.  
  
“And, yes, I’m  _not_  dead, thanks for noticing, though maybe you’ve knocked ten years off my life, for all I even know. And that’s not even  _mentioning_  the  _concussion_  you gave me, thanks for  _that.”_  
  
My voice is rising in volume, almost to the point of shouting, and my voice quavers from the lack of control. It’s as though my feelings about everything that’s happened to me this year are coalescing into one violent, cacophonic conflagration of emotion. I only note in passing that a few rogue tears have begun to stream down her cheeks.  
  
“And I didn’t tell the school to do a single goddamn thing, so don’t blame me for whatever they did. Sorry, not my problem. You should have thought of that before you went sprinting through the halls. You want me to feel better? You want to make things right? You can start by  _getting out of my life._  God knows it’s short enough already  _without_  you in it!”  
  
I shove the overbed table out of the way, getting to my feet, as she backs towards the door.  
  
“What the hell are you waiting for? Get out,” I growl, practically shouting, violently gesticulating with my hands to wave her off.  _“Get. Out!”_  
  
Speechless, she glances into my eyes with a look of profound hurt and disdain, then briskly turns around and rushes out of the room. From behind the wall I hear her mother call out her name, and then silence.  
  
 _What, that’s it?_  
  
I stand there in the empty room, my palms sweating, my legs shaking and my heart pounding, for what feels like minutes, staring blankly into the empty grey rectangle of the doorway, but she’s gone… they’re both gone. Whatever it was that just happened… it’s over now.  
  
 _Are you kidding me? That’s it, we’re just done here? No, to Hell with it, as long as I’m on a hot streak, let’s get the entire cavalcade of boneheads in here so that I can shout at_ them,  _too. Hakamichi, Hikaru, Mutou, Mother, that idiot doctor… I can keep going. Let’s just have a goddamned marathon!  
  
Let’s just…  
  
Just…_  
  
There’s a sudden sensation like the door swinging open on a cold winter night, and I can feel my heart pulsing so excitedly in my chest that I very nearly fall to my knees. It’s a miserable feeling, like hanging upside down and getting punched in the stomach.  
  
 _What… what the hell is wrong with me?_  
  
My whole body is still rigid with unresolved tension, and my stomach and chest feels sore, as though I ate something that disagreed with me. My head seems to be burning up, and even the overpowered air conditioning of the hospital doesn’t seem to be sufficient anymore.  
  
I finally turn away from the doorway, leaning my elbows onto the hospital bed, just trying to find my center, but I can’t seem to make the feeling go away. It’s like an agitation, a feeling like I just committed a serious crime and know I’m going to be caught for it. A feeling like I just broke something I can’t ever replace.  
  
Glancing over to the pillow, I grab it off the bed, rushing into the restroom and shutting and locking the door behind me. I set it against the rim of the sink, burying my whole face into it. I scream at the top of my lungs, muffling it with the pillow, pressing my head against the cold ceramic of the sink, and scream, and scream, until my voice has given out entirely. Then, utterly deprived of energy, I slink onto the floor, leaning against the bathroom door, panting slightly.  
  
 _No…_  This  _must be rock bottom._  
  
I don’t think I’ve ever felt so exhausted in my entire life. Or confused. Or disgusted. It’s like I don’t even know who I am anymore.  
  
What  _was_  that back there? When have I ever been so wantonly callous?  
  
I’ve never lost my temper like that before. Never in my entire life. I usually can’t even raise my own voice without feeling self-conscious. And yet… that just happened. I completely exploded at a total stranger, in the most crass way possible. It’s like… like I don’t even know who I am anymore.  
  
What the hell is going on with me? How am I ever going to function normally in society if this is the way I act, now?  
  
My face is still hot… my whole body is. Pulling myself to my feet, I stagger over to the air conditioning unit by the window and turn it all the way up, letting the cool air wash over me and clear my head.  
  
This really isn’t working, is it? This whole Yamaku experiment is just a mess. When I realized I was steadily becoming a worse person, I thought that going back to school like this would reverse the damage, but I’m clearly just getting worse. I hate myself now more than I did four days ago, that’s for sure.  
  
Just lying in here sulking about it isn’t going to make things any better, though. I have to think. I have to come up with a solution, because the ones other people have come up with for me have all been unmitigated garbage.  
  
Do I stay at Yamaku? What would the point be anymore? Can anything even be salvaged from this? The whole thing has been a disaster. Much of that has been thanks to Emi Ibarazaki, but I have more than a few reservations about other aspects of the school, as well. I don’t think there’s any chance that I can be happy there, anymore. Or even any chance that I can feel safe, really.  
  
No, I think I have to leave. But how would I even do that? Where would I go? Yet another high school? Yet another clean slate? How many will I even need until one of them finally sticks?  
  
Maybe I never should have transferred out of my old school, but that ship has sailed now, too. Anyway, it wouldn’t be a good idea to try and make my way back there. I’ve burned my bridges with basically everybody I knew there. Nothing short of a total disaster would ever make me come back.  
  
I can’t completely discount the nuclear option: What if I simply drop out? Nobody’s  _forcing_  me to go to high school. If I were to simply stop attending, nobody would be able to stop me. What are they going to do? Throw me in jail? Deny me my medications unless I agree to go? My parents might be a little unhappy with me, but who even cares? I never see my dad, and my mom’s in no position to judge me. I could probably spend all my time in our condo in Shibuya, doing nothing all day. Maybe I could take up the piano again, or practice my cooking skills, or just watch a ton of movies like I did back in the hospital.  
  
The idea of spending the rest of my life mooching off my father isn’t very attractive, but then none of these choices are. In the end, maybe quitting school is the best option. I’d never have said that before my heart attack, but, well, the paradigm has shifted. I’m not a normal person anymore, and I won’t ever be again. My outburst a few minutes ago has shown me that much.  
  
The air conditioning is starting to nip at my bare skin, so I turn it back down and return to the bed, where I while away the next few hours, staring blankly at the ceiling tiles and emergency sprinklers, mulling over my many terrible options. Dropping out is, sadly, starting to seem like the most appealing choice.  
  
Hypothetically speaking, if I were to hop onto the Shinkansen as soon as I was discharged from the hospital and sneak back to our condo in Shibuya, would anybody be able to prevent me? How long would it take for people to realize I was gone? A week, perhaps? And even when they found me, it’s not like they could drag me back.  
  
Then whenever my mother got back from Europe, she and I and father could have another discussion about my future. A real one, not simply a preordained discussion with them filling out transfer paperwork while I gather dust in a hospital bed.  
  
Maybe it’s worth a try. Not like anything good is going to happen at Yamaku from here on out…  
  
“I… Iwa…o..”  
  
Huh? What was that?  
  
“I, Iwanako?”  
  
The soft voice is so quiet that, for a moment, I think I’m imagining it.  
  
I lift my head, surprised to hear my name. To my surprise, when I glance over to the doorway, a very familiar amethyst-eyed girl is peering at me cautiously from behind the doorway, her nose hidden behind the door frame.  
  
 _Huh?!  
  
“Hanako?!”_  
  
Then another voice chimes in invisibly from behind. It’s a smooth, refined voice, one I’m sure I’ve never heard in my life.   
  
“Oh, is she in there?”


	13. Safe Reboot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Birds may swim and fish may fly, but life'll always be too short to read some books.

I… can’t even think of anything to say. I’m splayed across the hospital bed like an abandoned doll, my upper body slightly propped up by my elbows, and all my thoughts seem fleeting and nebulous. Absently, I find myself staring at her… or what little I can see of her, as she’s still almost completely obscured by the door frame.  
  
 _…Why is she here?_  
  
Hanako Ikezawa… Since I initially woke up in the hospital, she hadn’t crossed my mind even once. I liked her when we worked together the other day, and I felt like I’d taken a respectable shot at getting to know her, I guess, but I certainly didn’t think I made the kind of lasting impression you’d need to be  _visited in a hospital_. All I did was enlist her aid on a group assignment in order to get away from somebody I couldn’t stand.  
  
It’s not like I know  _anyone_  at Yamaku that well. When I told Mutou people could visit me, it was meant as an empty gesture. I only spent two-and-a-half days there, and those were days spent wandering around or oversleeping. Nobody really mattered that much, and I was all right with that. But now Hanako drifts into focus in the middle of my great emotional meltdown, and it’s such a non sequitur that I can’t do much more than appreciate how dumbfounded I am.  
  
“Er… Hanako,” I manage to whisper out, “would you… like to come in?” I’m startled by the sound of my own overtaxed voice as I speak—it’s still hoarse from my earlier screaming, and noticeably quavering.  
  
After a long pause, Hanako nods, finally beginning to take the first of some very tentative steps inside, her eyes still on me. She touches her arm nervously and glances down at the floor tiles.  
  
And then the room once again falls into awkward silence, as though each of us is waiting for some kind of signal from the other that we don’t know how to make. She looks over her shoulder, and it makes me remember, vexedly, that she brought somebody along. Who  _that_  might be, I haven’t even the slightest idea.  
  
“Miss Daidouji?”  
  
A tall figure steps over the threshold, and for a second, I wonder if I’m even awake.  
  
 _Who… Who is…?!_  
  
A Westerner—maybe—stands in the doorway, taller than Hanako and surely almost a head taller than me, with shimmering, voluminous golden hair collected into a ponytail spilling far down her back, and smooth, delicate features, like a figure in a pre-Raphaelite painting. She’s so  _preposterously_  beautiful that I nearly find myself wondering if Hanako hired an actress to pose as her friend before I remember how stupid that sounds.  
  
“Y-yes?” My ravaged voice sounds so vulgar compared to hers, like an out-of-tune shamisen coming in after a Stradivarius.  
  
She smiles, and something about it makes me feel at once both calm and insufferably frantic. “I apologize for barging in on you like this,” she says gently, her speech formal, giving a slight bow. “My name is Lilly Satou. I’m the class representative of class 3-2, and a friend of Hanako’s.”  
  
“I… er…” I stumble over my own words for a moment, still too, well—‘discombobulated’ is the only word to describe it—to formulate any kind of thoughtful response. “It. Is. Nice. To… meet you.”  
  
 _We are certainly on a roll today._  
  
“A-and… please, call me Iwanako,” I add hastily, deciding at the last second to be congenial.  
  
She nods confidently, her smile unyielding. “Of course. And I hope you will call me Lilly as well.”  
  
Her speech is  _so_  refined. Under ordinary circumstances, I’d be able to keep up, but…  
  
As I’m glancing between the two of them, desperately trying to figure out  _what in god’s name is going on,_ Hanako pulls a heavy-looking parcel out of her school bag and holds it out to me with both hands.  
  
“W-we brought you b-books,” she stammers.  
  
They brought me books. Brought me books? The words somehow don’t seem to make any sense, and I find myself blinking rapidly. “I… I’m sorry?”  
  
“To help pass the time,” Lilly explains, her smile somehow taking on even more warmth. “I had… a chance to speak with Miss Hakamichi this morning, and she happened to mention that she helped Mutou bring you your classwork last night. It occurred to us you might get bored with only that, so we borrowed some books from the library on your behalf.”  
  
 _I… but what… why are they…_  
  
My head rushes with blood as I sit up, and, gingerly, I collect the parcel from Hanako. When I unwrap it, a bounty of hardcover novels spill out, from what looks to be several different genres. More than enough to get me through the rest of the seventy-two hours I’ll be stuck in here.  
  
…I can’t seem to reconcile this gesture with the context in which it was made, and even trying to think about it brings into sharp relief the migraine-quality headache that I’m still enjoying. Who  _are_  these girls, and why in hell would they care enough to do this?  
  
I glance up from the books, studying the two of them. Hanako’s watching me anxiously, and Lilly continues to stand elegantly in the doorway, the serene, almost impossibly picturesque smile still present on her face.   
  
To have two complete strangers wander over and do something like this for me… it’s utterly surreal. And I was griping about the lack of reading material only a few hours ago…  
  
“I… this is… thank you so much,” I manage to say, finally remembering that manners  _exist_  and are a thing I’m still on the hook to have. “This is… just what I needed, honestly.”  
  
My words make Hanako’s tense expression slacken considerably, and it makes me anxious that  _she_  was so anxious. Lilly simply nods, looking more than a little satisfied. It makes a lock of golden-blonde hair tumble against her cheek, and I almost forget to speak again.  
  
“I can’t… I really can’t believe you went to all this trouble,” I whisper, baffled.  
  
Lilly giggles, a sound I can only describe, absurdly, as like a kitten brushing gently against the strings of a harp. “Well, it was Hanako who selected the books. I simply came along.”  
  
Hanako’s eyes are on me again, but her expression still seems a bit, well, troubled, for reasons I can’t quite pin down, and though it’s difficult to get my thoughts straight, I can’t get over this lingering feeling that I’ve forgotten something blindingly obvious. Lilly seems considerably more placid, but since she’s much more poised, it’s hard to read into that.  
  
“Hanako,” I say, after a pause, “Thank you. This… really means a lot.”  
  
She smiles and gives an almost imperceptible nod of the head. “You’re w-welcome.”  
  
There’s a trepidation in her voice that makes my stomach tumble, and it only increases my suspicions that there’s something going on that I’m not seeing. Something very wrong.  
  
Lilly speaks again before I can figure out what that is. “Would you like some company for a little while?”  
  
For just a moment I think she means  _company_  in the ‘group of professionals’ sense, and wonder if she’s suddenly trying to sell me shares of stock. That reflects pretty accurately, and pretty sadly, on my mental acuity right now.  
  
“…Huh?”  
  
Her brow furrows slightly with concern. “You weren’t sleeping when we came by, were you?”  
  
“N-no,” I say, quickly straightening myself out along the edge of the bed. “I was just lying down. I wasn’t doing anything important.”  
  
 _Company._ Like, spending time with me. The meaning of her words finally catches up to where it should have been all along… Wait,  _company?_ They want to stay here  _longer?_  
  
Running my fingers through my hair, I try to concentrate on some reason why I shouldn’t have company right now, but concentration isn’t working out. For whatever reason, I’m reminded of that plane that flew hundreds of kilometers on autopilot before crashing because everyone on board was dead of carbon monoxide poisoning. Or cabin depressurization, I can’t remember. It was a thing.  
  
This is my opportunity to send them away if I want to go back to being alone, but… Do I even want to be alone right now? On one hand, I seem to be going stir crazy, but on the other hand, I don’t want to risk anybody else seeing me while I’m stir crazy. Or whatever kind of crazy. Not to mention brain damaged.  
  
“Er, some company would be… nice,” I finally say, more in spite of my reasoning than because of it. “There’s… chairs along the wall there.”  
  
I point to them, but Lilly continues to look in my direction. Or through my direction? She actually doesn’t seem to be…  
  
Surprisingly, Hanako takes the initiative, moving to pull up the two chairs, Lilly sitting down as soon as one gets pulled behind her. Then Hanako takes the seat beside her, her expression still not particularly reassuring. It’s the kind of expression I’d make if I was trying not to notice a massive zit on my friend’s face.  
  
I’m about to comment on it, but as I shift to sit up straighter, a mussed tangle of hair falls into my vision and I fuss over it mindlessly before another realization catches up to me: I look exactly as miserable as I feel. Every time she’s seen me before, it was after I put something like an hour’s worth of effort into my appearance, and I was wearing enough clothing and makeup to conceal or distract from my unhealthy thinness. But now, especially with this terrible P.E. uniform, the glamour has been lifted, and she’s seeing for the first time how awful I look.  
  
“Eeeh, I’m sorry,” I interject self-consciously. I can’t help myself “I look like a mess… I wasn’t expecting company…”  
  
Then Lilly giggles. “My, my, you don’t need to apologize for that. This is your hospital room, after all.”  
  
Though that makes sense, it still completely fails to assure me. “Even so… I look like a trainwreck.”  
  
The corners of her lips curl with impish amusement, and I instantly know that I’ve done something tremendously stupid. “Well, I’ll have to take your word for it.”  
  
I gaze at her, vexed, before it finally dawns on me what she means, and then—  
  
Tch—!  
  
My eyes almost bug out of my head like a character in an old cartoon. If I’d had something in my mouth, I would be choking on it.  
  
Not that it isn’t believable; it explains why she doesn’t track me with her eyes when I’m speaking, and, now that I look closer, her azure eyes have a faint sort of milkiness to them that I didn’t see earlier, but… How can anybody be so beautiful and not even…? Is she  _accidentally_  that gorgeous?!   
  
It doesn’t… it just doesn’t... It’s not… I’m trying to wrap my head around it and the wrapping is too frayed to cover it completely. It’s such a startling thing that several awkward seconds pass as I try to fully contemplate it and I completely forget to break the silence before it starts to get odd.  
  
“…Iwanako?”  
  
“Oh,” I murmur, her voice jarring me back to reality. “Er, I didn’t actually notice you couldn’t see. I’m sorry for that, too…”  
  
That makes her giggle again, and I wonder if I should be offended or not, and how stupid I must look. “Please, don’t worry about that. I don’t barge into hospital rooms just to make patients notice my condition.”  
  
“Heh…”  
  
The idea makes me smile, in spite of everything. She’s obviously trying to make me feel more at ease, and I appreciate it. It helps to distract me from this sinking feeling of dread I’m having, and I find myself looking back over to Hanako. She’s been awfully quiet, and though she’s looking at me, she’s not making eye contact. She’s looking downward at…  
  
Oh.  _No. Damn_ it.  
  
These obnoxious Yamaku Phys Ed shirts, for reasons unknowable yet terrible, have a bit of a V neck to them, and when I’m hunched slightly forward, the upper tip of my scar pops out noticeably. I didn’t even realize it until now, but... Hanako’s been trying to avoid looking at it since the moment she walked in.  
  
It doesn’t take her long to notice I’ve figured it out, and that only makes things worse. She quickly looks away, staring determinedly at the drywall. I’m almost inclined to comment, but then I stop myself.  
  
 _I guess that turnabout is fair play… I mean, I stared at her scars too, but still… Why did she have to see it? Anything would have been better. Even a_ rogue nipple  _would have been better._  
  
I quickly move to straighten out my shirt, and it more deeply underscores how troubled and sensitive I am about the whole thing. It brings back into focus all the disasters I’ve been dealing with lately, and my expression sours visibly despite myself. As soon as it happens, I’m mad it did, because Hanako notices immediately and her whole body seems to tighten up in a way that makes me feel like a complete jerk.  
  
“Oh, would you care for some tea?” Lilly’s voice comes in again, throwing me back off track. “I have some with me, if you can find some hot water somewhere.”  
  
 _Tea? What? Why does she have tea with her?_  
  
 _Well… not that I couldn’t go for some right now. I need to mellow out, or I’m just going to feel even sicker._  
  
“I… I’d love some tea, actually,” I answer. “There’s a hot water dispenser by the bathroom door…” Again, I gesture at it, before I remember how pointless it is.  
  
“That should do nicely,” she answers, a flash of uncertainty touching her face. “Ah… Hanako… do you think you could, please…”  
  
She trails off, and it takes me a moment to follow what’s going on before I remember that she probably has no idea how this room is laid out. She probably doesn’t even know I have a table. I don’t know that she could move around on her own without becoming oriented first.  
  
“Oh,” I interject, moving to stand up. “I can…”  
  
“N-no,” Hanako says, slight anxiety still in her voice. “I’ll do it…”  
  
She gets to her feet much faster than I could, especially in my still-concussed state, so I don’t have much time to mount a polite protest, and I settle down, watching her. Though I expect her to take three of the polystyrene cups mounted in a stack on the side of the dispenser, she surprises me by going for Lilly’s satchel instead. She withdraws an object covered in cloth, and when she unwraps it I see, to my surprise, that it’s a sturdy-looking travel-size teapot.  
  
 _They brought a whole teapot with them? But… why?_  
  
She fills it with hot water from the dispenser, and I try to help in my own way by adjusting both the overbed table and the bed itself to be a comfortable distance and in alignment with Hanako and Lilly’s chairs, so I can sit on the bed and face them across the table. As I do this, Lilly gingerly reaches forward and feels the contours of the table, apparently to judge its height and shape, and then withdraws three teacups from her satchel, setting them delicately on the table’s surface.  
  
They brought almost an entire tea set to my hospital room. I don’t even know these people, and they brought a tea party to my room. I have no idea what’s going on.  
  
Hanako returns to her seat, setting the teapot on the table, and Lilly thanks her, preparing the tea on her own. There’s a limit to how much formality you can achieve here—this is by no means an ideal setting to enjoy tea, and we don’t even have all the accoutrements you really need—but Lilly moves with a refined elegance regardless, looking wholly out of place amidst the oppressive banality of the hospital room.  
  
The routine seems to distract Hanako from the earlier weirdness with my scar, and she seems to be relaxed again, but if we keep working each other up like this, I don’t know about her, but  _I’m_  going to lose my mind. It’s not like I have the exact coordinates on it as it is.  
  
Hanako did mention having a friend before, now that I think about it. This must be her, but the contrast between the two is striking. Hanako always seems so nervous and shy, and there’s always sort of a jerky awkwardness to her motions, while Lilly seems to radiate a calm, extroverted confidence. I can’t really imagine how or why these two could have become friends.  
  
As Lilly begins to pour my cup of tea, working around her blindness with one digit of what a romantic would probably call pianist’s hands, it hits me that Lilly Satou does a better Iwanako than I do. I’ve always aspired to being graceful and well-mannered, at least until my recent string of calamities, but this girl is so far out of my league that I feel self-conscious just being in the same room as her.  
  
No, that’s wrong. I feel self-conscious because Lilly’s sitting almost precisely atop the smoking crater in the linoleum where Emi was standing when I gave completely into my baser impulses and raged like a maniac until she ran off.  
  
Ugh.  _Ugh!_ God… I can’t do this. I just can’t do this. I can’t sit here and sip tea while that memory is still fresh in my mind. While I’m like… this, stammering like a drunkard and too distracted to speak like an adult.  
  
“So,” Lilly says, her smooth voice ringing out, “have you been feeling better today?”  
  
Have I been feeling better today…? That’s a hell of a question.  
  
I don’t really know what she or Hanako knows about what happened to me. I can assume, but I don’t know for certain—and it occurs to me that the two of them might be in contact with Emi Ibarazaki, though they’re playing their cards close to the chest if this has something to do with  _her._ I  _do_  think there’s more to this than what I’m seeing, but I don’t know these girls well enough to speculate as to what that could be.  
  
“…Not really,” I answer, finally.  _That_  much is obvious. “But I’ll be fine,” I lie.  
  
Lilly nods slowly, taking a dainty sip from her teacup. “I’m glad to hear that…”  
  
She furrows her brow in a pensive expression, and I let the moment of silence stand, taking a sip from my own cup so I have more time to figure out what I should say.  
  
The tea is like manna from heaven going down—I barely even take note of the fact that it’s English breakfast as I relish in the way it soothes my throat and warms my chest. Black tea isn’t really my bailiwick, but it’s been so long since I sat down and just enjoyed a cup that I don’t even care right now. It’s the most anodyne experience I’ve had in weeks.  
  
It helps me clear my mind, too, and I realize I’m going to be at a disadvantage as long as I don’t know whatever they know. They clearly know something, and Hanako already got a look at my scar, so I may as well clear the air.  
  
“…I have a heart condition,” I say, finally. “An arrhythmia. I… it hospitalized me for four months, and then my parents had me transferred to Yamaku.”  
  
To say it out loud just feels so strange... I’ve never had to explain it to anyone before. I never felt like anybody needed to know before now. If my hand hadn’t been forced by Ibarazaki, no one would.  
  
Lilly, for her part, just nods silently. I barely catch Hanako staring at me with a worried expression before she glances into her tea.  
  
“I had heard something to that effect, but I wasn’t sure, exactly,” Lilly says softly. “I’m sure you don’t remember this, but I… encountered you yesterday, in the hallway, before the nurse arrived. I tried to speak with you, but…” She trails off, clearly uncomfortable having this conversation with a total stranger.  
  
So is that why she came here? She saw—well, discovered—me in an imperiled state and was concerned? But still…  
  
“It’s… I’m going to be fine,” I say. “I have a concussion, but I’m going to make a full recovery.”  
  
Well, depending on your definition of ‘full’…  
  
She seems slightly more surprised to hear that. “A concussion…” She shakes her head disbelievingly. “I…”  
  
She pauses, apparently stopping herself from giving whatever expression of sympathy she was about to give. It’s an unexpectedly shrewd move. I don’t have any interest in revisiting what happened, especially not after what  _just_  happened.  
  
“Well, it’s over now,” I say resignedly. “I won’t be here forever. I’m getting released soon.”  
  
She gives a weak smile at that, but she doesn’t say anything. I guess this awkward conversation is awkward for her as well. Though I’m probably to blame, since I’m not doing a good job of concealing how miserable I am.  
  
This is clearly as good a time as any for a change of subject, so I decide to do the honors. I’m really not in the mood to talk about my heart right now. Or anything in my skull, for that matter.  
  
“So, Hanako,” I say, turning to her, “did I miss anything in class this morning?”  
  
She pauses, apparently startled that I’m suddenly addressing her, then shakes her head. “I-I w-wasn’t there this m-morning…”  
  
“Huh, really?” I pause for a second to ponder that. “Well, good for you, I guess.”  
  
At that, Lilly smiles a bit more brightly. “Not fond of science class, then?”  
  
“It’s better than being hospitalized,” I say dryly, “but only marginally.”  
  
Lilly giggles again, and my eyes are drawn to the way her hands move to cover her mouth as she does so. It’s just… baffling to me how fluid and elegant she manages to make every gesture. I don’t think I could do that with years of coaching, and I say that as someone who took figure skating classes as a child.  
  
“Oh, but don’t you like Mutou? He’s such a character.”  
  
 _No._  
  
“He’s… all right,” I say, and leave it at that. “Miyagi seems nice, though.”  
  
“She is,” Lilly says, warmly. “She teaches my class, 3-2. She’s a very clever and kind person.”  
  
“I got that impression, the few times I spoke to her.”   
  
Miyagi is an energetic, coltish woman in her early to mid-thirties, who really seems to have a passion for teaching and interacting with students, which is refreshing. Her coursework is far too easy, but she’s pleasant enough to converse with, and very pretty in a boyish sort of way, despite always smelling a bit like cigarette smoke. So far, she’s my favorite member of the faculty here.  
  
“Are you interested in stars? She supervises the astronomy club.”  
  
“But… she’s an English teacher?”  
  
She nods. “Strange, isn’t it? I heard there was even a dispute with Mutou over it. It’s hard to imagine.”  
  
It really is. I try to picture them quarrelling, and I really can’t envision a scenario other than Miyagi steamrolling Mutou and just taking what she wanted. Miyagi's very proactive, and Mutou...  
  
“On the subject of my class,” she continues, “Momomi says hello.”  
  
It takes me a moment to remember who she’s talking about, and even then, the subject seems to come completely out of nowhere. I tilt my head like a baffled puppy.  
  
 _“Momomi_  did?”  
  
“She sits behind me,” she explains. “We’ve known each other for a little over a year, now. I mentioned in passing that Hanako and I were planning to come here, and she asked me to pass along her regards.”  
  
I suppose it would make sense that they’d know each other, if they’re in the same year and they’re both, well, blind, especially if Lilly is the class representative. I just hadn’t given it any thought, until now. I hadn’t really given  _Momomi_  any thought.  
  
Lilly doesn’t make me think of Momomi at all. Momomi moves and speaks much more… aggressively than Lilly, and her eyes are like bottomless pits, not the gentle sky blue of Lilly’s.  
  
Of course, it probably isn’t fair to judge a blind person’s character by the look of their eyes, one way or the other…  
  
“You and Momomi are friends?”  
  
“Well,” Lilly says with a thoughtful smile, “I’d like to think so. She was a transfer student herself, actually.”  
  
“Hmm,” I murmur. It isn’t that much of a surprise to learn; Matsumoto gives off the vibe of not really fitting in amongst her classmates, at least from the handful of times we’ve had a conversation. Her being a transfer student would make sense, though it’s troubling that she still doesn’t seem to fit in even after a year.  
  
“At any rate,” she continues, “don’t be too offended if she doesn’t come by while you’re still here. She’s… not fond of hospitals.”  
  
“Heh,” I say, wan amusement creeping into my voice. “I don’t think anybody is.”  
  
That earns me the ghost of a smile from Hanako, who has otherwise been mostly silent for the last few minutes. She seems to be fairly comfortable around Lilly, so I have to assume she’s still unsettled because I look like I was only just recovered from being tied up in a basement somewhere.  
  
“Hmm…” Lilly says, sipping thoughtfully, “I suppose you have a point.”  
  
We pass the next few moments silently, though to her credit (certainly not mine), it’s a gentle, placid silence, not one I feel the urge to interrupt with my poor excuses for idle conversation. Even though we aren’t speaking, it feels nice just to enjoy the presence of other people, without having to suffer through a million clumsy gestures of poorly thought-out condolences. It’s just perfect in its simplicity; if I close my eyes it’s almost like how things used to be, back at my old school, when we’d just pass the time after school chatting nonchalantly and sipping tea.  
  
And, glancing over at her, I decide I actually like Lilly a lot, though I still don’t understand what would drive them to come out here just for my sake. It’s ostensibly an act of kindness, though such an unusual one that I keep finding myself waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like being suddenly invited to join a cult or something.  
  
But my feelings go deeper than just suspicion… There’s this memory from my childhood that I still think about. It still haunts me to this day, especially at times like this.  
  
I was in fifth grade, and this girl came to class one day, wearing a floppy, wide-brimmed hat. Headwear in the classroom was blatantly against the school rules, and, for whatever reason, I chose to make an example out of her for it. I kicked up an enormous fuss, refusing to stop badgering her until she took it off, and since I belonged to a pretty cliquey group of girls they all joined in on tormenting her about it. I told myself I was just enforcing the rules, but in retrospect I can see that I just felt like being cruel to another girl that day.  
  
We brought her almost to the point of tears until the teacher finally noticed and stumbled out some excuse about how it was fine for her to wear the hat because it was part of her outfit. She continued to wear the hat for weeks afterward.  
  
Later that year, on my birthday, our teacher informed us that she died. She’d had cancer.  
  
When I found out, I broke down. I immediately recalled the way I had behaved, and nothing could get the memory of what I had done out of my mind. How could it? I was inconsolable for the rest of the day.   
  
That afternoon, when I finally came home from school, I discovered that my parents had adopted the kitten I’d been begging them to get for months and months on end. I saw the earnest, affectionate expression in its eyes, and something in me just... snapped. I wouldn’t eat for two days afterward, wouldn’t leave my room other than to go to school. I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t handle somebody doing something nice for me, after what I’d done. Of course, my parents had no clue what I was going through, and I felt far too ashamed to tell them.  
  
It wasn't too long before they returned the kitten, because I never played with her. And when I found out, I felt guilty about  _that,_ too.  
  
Perhaps with the benefit of hindsight I can see how histrionically I behaved back then, but I’ve never forgotten that feeling of guilt. I’ve never forgotten hating myself so much that any act of kindness literally nauseated me.  
  
For Lilly and Hanako to be here, for me, with the memory of the way I spoke to Ibarazaki still so clear in my mind… It’s almost too much to take. I think they’re both remarkable people, and I feel blessed and flattered that they actually seem to care, but I just  _don’t deserve it._  
  
“…More tea?” Lilly asks, suddenly, tearing me away from my thoughts yet again. I note in passing that she has a tendency to ask a question right as I’m beginning to sink into darkness… But that can’t be intentional.  
  
“Huh?” I stammer, surprised. It suddenly occurs to me that she realized my cup was empty simply by the sound of my setting it down on the table. That’s… pretty impressive.  
  
“Er… yes, I would like some more, please.”  
  
As she pours me a cup just as delicately as she did the first time, I decide to distract myself from my thoughts of cancer, cats, and collisions by glancing through the books Hanako selected for me. I’m not really a bibliophile, so I’ve never read any of them before, but all of them look interesting.  
  
“I’m impressed, Hanako… these actually look like books I’d want to read,” I say, trying to keep the conversation light. “It’s a good thing you didn’t bring  _Anne of Green Gables_ , or I’d have to throw it off the roof…”  
  
Hanako glances up at me with a nonplussed expression. “W-what?”  
  
“Oh!” Lilly says, sounding disappointed. “You don’t like  _Anne of Green Gables?_ ”  
  
“It’s absolutely the most insipid thing I have ever read,” I answer firmly. “Nothing happens in the entire story. It’s just four hundred pages of glurge.”  
  
Her brow furrows, and she wrinkles her nose at me, offended. “That’s my favorite book…”  
  
“What?” I stammer, my cheeks getting hot. “I… er… really?”  
  
She goes silent, her face an expressionless mask for a long, agonizing moment. I feel my stomach flutter, and ponder how I could  _possibly_  mitigate what I just said...  
  
...Until she drops the façade and giggles. “No. Not really. I don’t think I’ve read that book since I was twelve.”  
  
I exhale, letting out a little laugh of indignation.  _Haha. Okay._  
  
“That was mean! For a moment, I thought I’d really offended you.”  
  
Lilly giggles again, and I can’t help but notice Hanako quietly cracking a smile beside her.  
  
“Well,” Lilly says, bringing the teacup to her lips, “I do remember enjoying it. I thought it was sweet.”  
  
I sigh, slightly melodramatically. “I could probably ramble for hours about how terrible it is. I think I’m the only girl in Japan who can’t stand it. It’s my cross to bear…”  
  
“Um,” Hanako suddenly chimes in, “I d-didn’t like it either…”  
  
I smile at her. “You’re just saying that to cheer me up.”  
  
“N-no!” She shakes her head. “I r-really didn’t… I thought Anne w-was obnoxious.”  
  
“Hee, really? That’s wonderful. We should form a club.”  
  
“I think you might have trouble finding a supervisor for such a club,” Lilly says dryly.  
  
“That’s all right,” I muse. “I think I’m done with clubs for the foreseeable future, anyway.”  
  
“Well,” Lilly says, thoughtfully brushing a silken strand of golden hair out of her face, “I’m not a part of one, either. My duties as class representative don’t leave me with enough time.”  
  
“I can imagine. I was class representative our first year,” I say wistfully, staring into my tea. “It… well… I wasn’t terrible at it, but… it just took too much out of me.”  
  
She smiles more warmly, placing her index finger on her cheekbone. “I don’t know that it’s quite as bad as that here. But I’m fortunate in that I enjoy a good relationship with my classmates, and they’re usually eager to help out.”  
  
She pauses. “Speaking of which… Would you happen to know what time it is?”  
  
I glance at the clock. “It’s a quarter after…”  
  
Lilly sighs. “Iwanako… I’m sorry, we’re going to have to get going soon. My class is working on preparations for the Festival, and I promised I would only be gone an hour.”  
  
“I… oh. No… that’s fine,” I stammer. “I know that’s important.”  
  
 _Well, to every student but me, that is. And now Ibarazaki, I guess._  
  
“What is your class doing for the Festival?” I ask, finding myself trying to draw out the conversation as long as possible.  
  
“A noodle stand,” she answers, giving a tired smile. “With any luck, we’ll be able to get the preparations finished before dinner.”  
  
“Oh? That sounds nice.”  
  
“I certainly hope so. We’ve put a lot of work into it. It should be a lot of fun,” she says, before something seems to occur to her, and she furrows her brow. “Will you be able to attend the Festival? Or…”  
  
“I… don’t really know right now,” I sigh. “I’m expecting to be discharged on Saturday, but depending on how I feel, I might just be exchanging one bed for another…”  
  
As soon as the words leave my mouth, the atmosphere in the room seems to almost visibly darken, and I immediately wish I could have taken it back.  
  
I should have just said ‘yes’, even if it turned out to be a lie. Nobody would have even known.  
  
“It isn’t really a problem,” I add quickly. “Even if I don’t have the energy for it, I’ll come up with something fun to do.”  
  
Like sleep. Or stare at the ceiling.  
  
However I felt about the Festival before, one of the saving graces of this whole misadventure is that I no longer feel obligated to attend it, or even to think about it. The two most vital systems in my body got injured on the same day. It doesn’t mean I’m a loser if I decide to stay in on Sunday.  
  
And… I have to face the fact that I’m just not in the mood for fun and games right now, and I won’t be in two days, either. I’m not even sure I still want to attend  _this school._ This just isn’t the right time for me.  
  
Lilly still looks concerned, though, and it makes that awful feeling come back. She isn’t going to say it because she’s wise enough not to, but she does feel bad for me.  
  
“You…” she says, hesitating. “You really haven’t gotten to experience much of the good side of our school, have you?”  
  
Does it really bother her so much?  
  
I shrug, again forgetting that the gesture is lost on her. “I don’t hold my bad luck against Yamaku. There are students running down the halls in every school in the country.”  
  
 _Things wouldn’t be any better anywhere else,_ I almost say.  
  
“Even so… I could understand you coming to dislike the school, after everything that has happened.”  
  
 _After everything that’s happened? Nothing’s… really happened…_  
  
“The school… the school isn’t the problem,” I say, lowering my head slightly. “I’m…”  
  
I stop myself. It hits me like a lightning bolt.  
  
 _…the problem. That’s right, isn’t it?_ I am the problem.  
  
The world is going to spin, my family is going to vanish, school is going to be in session, and idiots are going to run through the halls. But me? I never adapt to anything. I never move forward with both feet. And then I get surprised when I notice my sanity starting to slip.  
  
When I’m left to my own thoughts, I can’t be trusted. Every single time I give myself time to dwell on what I’m going through, everything gets worse. Everything goes wrong. It happened over those long four months, and it’s happening again, and I don’t give people enough credit for seeing through me.  
  
Spending the whole weekend in my room is the  _last_  thing I need to do. I can’t imagine a more surefire way to hurt myself.  
  
“…It’s nothing,” I say, finally. “You know… I think I  _will_  be at the Festival. If it gets to be too much for me, I’ll find a shady place to pass out.”  
  
And, I decide, I actually mean it. I’ll go to the damned Festival. Maybe if I pretend to be a normal person, I’ll believe it for a few hours.  
  
That seems to make Lilly smile, at least, though Hanako is still flashing a nervous glance at me through her hair every few moments.  
  
“I’m happy to hear that,” Lilly says, finishing off her tea. “You shouldn’t have to be alone.”  
  
“I… suppose so,” I admit.   
  
I thought I was used to it by now, but maybe I was lying to myself.  
  
It occurs to me that perhaps that’s why I haven’t been able to return to the mellow, vacuous state I was in before coming to Yamaku. That perhaps that whole experience was predicated on a lie, and as soon as I got even the smallest taste of companionship, I realized how much I needed it, like a long-recovered drug addict accidentally taking a pain pill and going into withdrawal.  
  
But even so…  
  
Having finished my own tea, I stand up off of the bed, and spend the next few moments helping to wash out the teapot and teacups, which Hanako helpfully wraps and places back in Lilly’s bag. I’m still feeling woozy, but it seems that it’s finally beginning to die down.  
  
As Lilly places her chair back against the wall, I see her withdraw an object from her bag, which extends out into a long, white, segmented cane. I guess that’s what she uses to navigate, since she doesn’t have a guide dog like Momomi. I wonder what kind of considerations go into using one versus the other.  
  
Walking over to the doorway to see them off, I smile at them, more for Hanako’s sake than Lilly’s.  
  
“Lilly… it was nice to meet you. And thank you both for visiting me. I… I hadn’t been having a good day before this.”  
  
Lilly smiles, reaching out to gently place a hand on my shoulder. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Iwanako. I look forward to speaking with you again.”  
  
“I do as well. Have fun with the Festival preparations.”  
  
“We will. And I hope you enjoy the books.”  
  
I give a lopsided smile. “I will,” I say, turning to Hanako again. “Thank you again for bringing them, Hanako. It really does mean a lot to me.”  
  
She finally returns the smile, nodding gently. “I h-hope you like them.”  
  
“Well… maybe I’ll see you on Sunday, then. Tell Momomi I said hello.”  
  
We get through our courtesies and farewells, and they both turn away, headed down the hallway. Hanako stops after a step, though, and turns back to me.  
  
“I-Iwanako?”  
  
“Hm?”  
  
“Why… why are you w-wearing that uniform…?”  
  
“Long story,” I sigh. “I haven’t had the best track record with people’s good intentions lately.”  
  
“Oh…”  
  
“Don’t worry about it. It’s still better than a hospital gown.”  
  
She nods. “I… I know.”  
  
“Take care, Hanako. And thanks.”  
  
I watch from the doorway as the two of them move down the corridor, eventually vanishing behind a corner. I continue to stand there for a few minutes at least, watching the empty hallway, trying to make sense of my thoughts.  
  
It now dawns on me that I should have exchanged phone numbers with them. Now that they’re gone, the room feels colder, somehow, like the air conditioning came on as soon as they left. They probably won’t be back before I’m discharged, and I doubt anybody else will come by, either. That means I won’t be seeing anybody for forty-eight hours, other than the medical staff.  
  
Forty-eight hours of nothing but quiet and solitude… My worst nightmare.  
  
The best thing I can say is that I finally seem to have partially recovered from the state Ibarazaki left me in when she came here. I haven’t completely gotten over it… I  _won’t_  completely get over it, but at least talking to Lilly and Hanako has helped me begin to think straight again. Somewhat straight, anyway. My hands have finally stopped shaking, and I’m starting to breathe normally again.  
  
So what now? I’ve got nothing but time, and nobody to spend it with. I can’t actually do anything, other than making a bunch of half-hearted resolutions I’ll already have forgotten by the time I actually get a chance to act on them.  
  
As I turn back to return to my bed, my gaze falls upon the pile of books Hanako brought me.  
  
Oh, right… I have these now. I suppose that settles it. All I need is for them to distract me from myself long enough to get the hell out of here, and then I can move forward from there.  
  
I pull myself back onto the bed, raise the head all the way to the top, pick one up, and get tucked in for the next few days.  
  
 _Thanks, Hanako…_

* * *

 

Friday comes and goes with very little fanfare. Other than the hospital staff, nobody calls, visits, or otherwise attempts to interact with me in any way. It’s boring, certainly, but it’s also nothing new, and, in a way, it’s comforting. Lately I’ve found myself disappointed by so many people that it’s almost relaxing not to have any more unpleasant surprises, even if that means being confined to a hospital room with nothing but a stack of books to keep you company.

My headache and the accompanying nausea have ebbed enough that I only really notice it when I try to stand up and walk around, but I feel dizzy enough when I do it that it’s not anything I feel safe doing alone. In the condition I’ve been in lately, falling again would most likely be disastrous to my health.  
  
As part of my redoubled effort to keep my mind from wandering down dark corridors at all costs, I spend most of the morning and afternoon nose-deep in a book about a unicorn on a journey to find others of her kind. Based on the premise, I expected it to be fluffy and childish, but it turns out to be kind of a disquieting read, with a much darker tone than I’d have anticipated in a story about unicorns. I finally wind up finishing the book shortly before lunch, and feel somewhat troubled for about an hour afterwards, for reasons I can’t quite seem to pin down. Something about the themes, I think.  
  
The second book I pick up is about an agent of a depowered federal government in a dystopian future where corporations control the entirety of the western world, and it’s pretty bleak and unsettling throughout. I don’t decide I like it until I’m a third of the way in, and even so, it takes most of the rest of the evening to finish it. It was a pretty compelling story, even if it was a bit complicated at times. It seems like the kind of story my father would enjoy for all the wrong reasons, if he was the kind of person who read books.  
  
I’m not sure whether Hanako has a taste for fantastical literature or if it’s simply what she thought I’d like, but I suspect it’s mostly the former. Everything here is fiction, and not many of the titles she brought me are what I’d consider down-to-earth stories. Knowing how shy she is, I get the feeling that reading is very much an escapist activity for her.  
  
Before my hospitalization, if I picked up a book, it was generally nonfiction. Most of the books I checked out from the library were either biographies or true crime, with maybe a smattering of historical fiction. When I opened a book, I didn’t want to escape the world entirely, I just wanted someone to prove to me that it could be more  _interesting_.  
  
Lately, though, I just haven’t been in the mood for reality. Maybe I finally found what it was that I needed to escape from.  
  
It’s already dark by the time I get very far into the third book (something about a prisoner of war who travels through time,) so I decide to call it a night and go to bed. I’m leaving the hospital tomorrow, and not a moment too soon.


	14. Extraordinary Rendition

I take a few steps back and give my appearance one final glance in the bathroom mirror. My uniform is on straight, my jewelry shines, my hair’s brushed out and my makeup is great as always… It’s wonderful, like a return to normality. Looking at me, you’d never think I narrowly avoided death three days ago.  
  
Sad as it is to say, the last time I really felt comfortable going out in public without  _any_  makeup, I was probably in middle school. Particularly since transferring into Yamaku, I’ve been coming to depend on that thin veneer of perfection to keep people from looking any deeper; Thursday with Ibarazaki and Hanako was a mistake, and not one I’m planning to make again. If you look better than everybody else, people are much less inclined to think that there’s anything wrong with you.  
  
As I return to the hospital bed to sit down, it occurs to me that that  _probably_  doesn’t work as well with so many blind people around, but, well, that’s what perfume is for, even if some people think it’s for prostitutes.  
  
Glancing at the clock, I note that it’s almost eleven-thirty. Earlier today, one of the hospital staff informed me that the Yamaku Foundation had called ahead and was sending a representative to handle my discharge paperwork and return me to the school. That doesn’t do me any good  _now_ , though, and since the person could arrive at any time within the next thirty minutes, I don’t feel like cracking open the book I’ve been reading. There won’t be enough time to get back into the story.  
  
Besides, I’m tired—it’s hard to say when I fell asleep last night, if at all, because a nightjar made her way to my hospital window and yammered on like a senile grandparent for what felt like hours and hours. Even if I _did_  eventually fall asleep for a while, there’d be no way to know, because clearly I was dreaming of nightjars.  
  
Once the sun went up, the nightjar mercifully flew home, only for a chatty pair of swallows to quickly take up her perch, where they’ve been incessantly tweeting for the last four or five hours, helpfully preventing me from stealing a few extra minutes of sleep. Sometimes I  _really hate_  living in the boondocks.  
  
So to kill time, I begin to idly braid my hair. After a few minutes my noodling has started to evolve into a waterfall braid, something that’s pretty challenging to do on your own, but as I’m putting the finishing touches on it I glance at the clock and realize only ten minutes have passed. Sighing, I pull out another rubber band and get to work on making it a  _double_  waterfall braid. Twenty minutes down, and I’m hoping somebody shows up before I have to make it a  _triple_  waterfall braid, because there’s only so much playing with your hair you can do before you start looking like you belong in an interstellar senate.  
  
I decide to forego the space-damsel hair for the time being. As I’m walking out the door to ask the nursing staff for a number I could call, I nearly bump into somebody walking in, and I jerk back into the room.  
  
 _Ah, geez…_  
  
“Oh! It’s good to see you, Iwacchan!”  
  
Misha’s bright, gold eyes lock on to me, like prison spotlights on an escaping convict. She takes my startled backing away as an invitation to follow me inside, and I’m somewhat less surprised, though certainly not pleased, to see Shizune sleekly filing in beside her, her expression unreadable as ever.  
  
“It’s… good to see you two as well,” I lie, feeling the cold, smooth metal of the bedframe mechanism against my palms as I back as far into the room as I can go.  
  
 _These two._  I sigh to myself.  _I’m not at all in the mood for this today._  
  
With everything that’s happened this week, I strongly question whether I’m in any mood to deal with Shizune and Misha, considering how quickly our relationship soured before Ibarazaki speared me in the hallway. The circumstances have changed drastically since then, of course, but not in any way that really impacts my relationship with the class representative.  
  
Well, that’s not really true.  _One_  thing is different, and that’s that now they know about my condition. As much as I want to believe that doesn’t change anything, I know it does. That isn’t to say I’m happy about the implications, though. Shizune suddenly wanting to be friendly and understanding now that she knows I could drop dead any day now would be a miserable turn of events.  
  
“I’m… surprised,” I say, my eyes flickering back and forth between theirs. “Did… the school send you to come get me?”  
  
A deep, pounding pressure somewhere under my skull pulses in resonance with the vibrato of Misha’s voice as she laughs for longer than what I’d call socially acceptable. Shizune’s hands cut back and forth through the air as she signs a reply I can barely even  _stare at_ , much less understand.  
  
“Iwacchan, one of our responsibilities as members of the Student Council is to escort students back when they get discharged from the hospital!”  
  
“Really?” I blink. “What’s the point of that?”  
  
“We don’t make the rules, Iwacchan~! Though,” Misha continues, and this seems to be her own contribution, “we don’t really get asked to do it all that often…”  
  
She trails off, and I can’t help but notice the quick annoyed look that Shizune shoots her in response. What’s that even mean? The Student Council doesn’t get asked to escort students very often? Why would it be, then, that the faculty would go through the trouble for  _my_  sake?  
  
Dismissing those concerns for the time being, I furrow my brow at them, my palms turned up askance. “So… does that mean we’re going to get on a bus? Or…?”  
  
“Of course not, Iwacchan~!” Misha grins at me, as if I’ve just brought up an inside joke that only the two of us understand. “Mr. Ufu drove us here!”  
  
 _Who?  
  
Is that even a_  name _?_  
  
I meet her smile with a blank stare to punctuate the fact that I have no idea what the hell she’s talking about. She simply grins wider, though, finally erupting in an ear-splitting  _‘Wahaha’_  that immediately makes me wish I’d just asked outright.  
  
“You probably haven’t met Mr. Ufu, Iwacchan,” Misha finally continues, translating for an increasingly impatient-looking Shizune. “He drives students to off-campus appointments in town, and handles most of the paperwork when a student comes back from the hospital… He does a lot of stuff, actually! Haha~!”  
  
Well. That makes a little more sense. It would be pretty stupid for a hospital to release custody of a student into the hands of another student, class representative or not. I’m not even sure if that’s legal.  
  
“But if, uh, Mr. Ufu handles it all, why does the Student Council need to show up?”  
  
Misha shrugs cheerfully. “Who knows, Iwacchan? Maybe to just keep you company, I guess?  _Haha_ ~! But, we’re really happy to see you~! We were worried about you!”  
  
Though Shizune wasn’t the one signing that last sentiment to me—those words were Misha’s, I can tell that much—Shizune grants me a small, congenial smile, not unlike the one she had when we first met on Monday, before she started acting like I was a complete letdown. I can’t tell if it’s a sincere gesture or simply a conciliatory one. Neither would surprise me at this point, and I’m not sure which I would prefer.  
  
Ignoring my skepticism for the moment, I nod graciously, allowing her a small smile of my own.  
  
“That’s very sweet of you,” I say, putting a dulcet note into my voice. “As you can see, though, I’m fine.”  
  
“Yep~! You look super…”  
  
Misha suddenly pauses mid-compliment just long enough—and just awkwardly enough—for me to blink reflexively, as though I’m trying to refresh my real life browser.  
  
“…Youlookreallynice, Iwacchan,” she finally finishes, her cheeks rosy from… shame, embarrassment; I’m not too clear.  
  
“Er… thanks,” I say, suddenly feeling self-conscious. I raise a hand to fidget with my hair before I remember that it’s been far too doctored to mess with. I straighten my tie instead, in a rather half-baked attempt to look natural. I don’t have any delusions that it succeeds.  
  
What was she going to say? The ambiguous hesitation in her compliment practically begs analysis. Was she going to make too direct a reference to my own mortality? ‘You look super healthy’? ‘You really look quite alive’?  
  
…Or did I go too ‘sci-fi princess’ with the hair?  
  
I’m too distracted by the comment to break off the long, uncomfortable moment that passes by wordlessly, and Shizune, either oblivious to the source of the awkwardness or unruffled by the mistake, raises a bemused eyebrow at us. Fortunately, the moment doesn’t drag on for very long, because a tan, rather robustly-bearded man with a fully shaved head steps into the room. He’s actually fairly imposing, and were it not for the Yamaku Foundation emblem embroidered into his coral-orange polo shirt, I might be a little scared to see him step into my hospital room.  
  
Upon meeting my eyes, he gives a small bow. “Miss Daidouji, it’s good to finally meet you. My name is Kazuki Ufugusuku. I’m in charge of transportation at Yamaku Academy. ”  
  
I immediately peg his accent as Okinawan (though in hindsight I could have guessed, with a name like that), and, upon closer examination, I realize I’ve seen him before—he was swimming laps in the pool on Tuesday when I met Aoi and Keiko. A fitness freak, perhaps? Well, there’s worse things to be.  
  
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Ufugusuku,” I say softly, returning his bow.  
  
“Eh, you can call me Mr. Ufu if you want,” he says, lazily waving a dismissive hand. “All the kids around here do, anyway.” He furrows a bushy brow at me. “Anyway, how was your stay here?”  
  
“No real complaints, I suppose,” I say, mostly sincerely.  
  
“Happy to hear that. I’ve taken care of all the paperwork,” he says, holding up a sheaf of papers for emphasis, “so if you’ve retrieved all your belongings, we can head out now.”  
  
“I’m ready, then.”  
  
“Good. I’d better grab a nurse… This hospital’s lawyers’ll never let you leave this place on your own two feet.”  
  
He steps back into the hallway, and I move to grab both my school bag and the duffel that Mutou brought me.  
  
“Iwacchan, we can grab those!” Misha says, holding her hands out to take the bags from me. “Just sit down and relax!”  
  
I peer at her quizzically. “You really don’t have to…”  
  
“It’s fine, it’s fine~! We’re here to make your life easier, Iwacchan!”  
  
 _I’m not sure I believe that._  
  
I consider protesting further, but I really don’t have the energy. Reluctantly, I pass the bags over. Not like they were that heavy, anyway.  
  
“Thanks,” I say, trying not to sound too insincere. “I really appreciate it.”  
  
They simply give placating smiles in response, Misha’s cheeks still red about the loutish way she delivered her earlier compliment.  
  
 _…Not really feeling at ease, here._  
  
The first caress of an outdoor breeze hits my cheek as I’m wheeled out to the entrance canopy and it’s like I can finally exhale for the first time in days. There’s only so much recycled air one can breathe before they start desiccating like they drank out of the wrong grail.  
  
Giving my grateful farewell to the nurse as I stand up out of the wheelchair, it feels good to stretch out. For a moment I get so lost just basking in the  _unhospitalness_  of everything that I actually forget the Student Council is beside me until Misha erupts in a loud yawn.  
  
For a moment it looks like Shizune is about to echo Misha, and that immediately captures my interest because I’ve never heard even the slightest hint of her voice. But when the anticipated yawn finally comes, it’s almost inspiringly skillful how noiseless she manages to make it.  
  
 _How does she even_  do  _that…?_  
  
“Tired?” I ask the question idly, resisting the urge to yawn myself, thanks to the aforementioned nightjar and his day shift.  
  
“Yeah, Iwacchan,” Misha says sadly, rubbing her brow. “It’s been a busy week~! We haven’t really had a break…”  
  
That wasn’t the answer I was expecting, and I wrinkle my forehead. “From studying for exams? Are they really going to be that bad?”  
  
They both look at me like I’m squirting Dijon mustard into my udon. Shizune’s expression suddenly intensifies so dramatically that the way her hands fly into fast, exasperated signing immediately tells me I said something wrong.  
  
“Not  _exams_ , Iwacchan! We’ve been working all week working on preparations for the  _Festival_! Did you really forget that was happening?”  
  
“Oh, of course. That,” I say, punctuating my inattentiveness with a simpering, self-deprecating rap against the forehead. It’s a gesture that kills me a little inside every time I have to resort to it, but I really want to bring the level of this conversation back down.  
  
It looks like Shizune wants to say more, but as she raises her hand, something seems to cross her mind and her arm goes limp. It doesn’t matter anyway, because the shuttle rolls up to the curb and Mr. Ufu rolls down the passenger-side window to beckon us in.  
  
The “shuttle” is a fairly large van with an automatic wheelchair ramp and the Yamaku Foundation emblem painted on the side. It looks like it could carry about six or seven students, but I wonder how often it transports more than two. Neither member of the Student Council wastes their time in entering through the ramp door, taking seats directly behind Mr. Ufu, so I go for broke and take shotgun.  
  
“Right-o. Buckle up. It’s only about a fifteen minute drive back from here, give or take some traffic.”  
  
I do so, and as the van rumbles back onto the city streets, the vehicle falls into silence. Well, at  _first_  I think it’s silence, but a passing glance at the backseat tells me I’m only technically right. Misha and Shizune are having a fairly animated conversation in sign language, not that I have any idea what it could be about. I’m doing my best not to care.  
  
The van slows to a halt as a stoplight, and my focus drifts idly to a handsome white Jindo dog being walked by an elderly man. As it sniffs curiously at a scrap of newspaper on the sidewalk I feel a pang of regret that I’m not in a position to pet it.  
  
Then Misha’s voice suddenly rings out. “Iwacchan,” she asks from the backseat, her signing slightly subdued by the seatbelt, “you  _are_  going to be able to attend the Festival, aren’t you?”  
  
“Hmm?” I glance over to the backseat. Her expression is a murky cocktail of hurt and worry, with a splash of pity.  _What, is she taking the idea of me not caring about the festival_  that  _seriously?_  
  
“It’s funny,” I murmur thoughtfully, “I’ve been getting asked that a lot lately.”  
  
That catches Shizune’s attention, and she quickly moves to sign a question at me. “Really, Iwacchan~? Who else asked you that?”  
  
“Well, Satou from Class 3-2 did,” I reply casually.  
  
There’s an almost imperceptible twitching of the Class President’s eye, and I can’t help but notice that she has to stop herself from frowning—her lips shrug slightly before returning to a perfect horizontal line of stoic neutrality. She exchanges a meaningful look with Misha before signing another question at me.  
  
“You spoke to  _Satou_  in the hospital? I wasn’t under the impression you knew her.”  
  
“Well, I didn’t,” I shrug. “I met her when she came with Ikezawa to leave me some books from the library.”  
  
Misha blinks at me with this unabashedly bewildered expression, like I just answered the question telepathically. Shizune, by contrast, looks like I answered it with a series of belches.  
  
“ _Ikezawa_  visited you in the hospital, Iwacchan?”  
  
“Um… yes,” I answer hesitantly.  _What, does that mean I have ten days to live or something?_  
  
Shizune raises a hand to sign something, but then seems to think better of it and signs something completely different. It’s kind of amusing to watch, because Misha begins to utter a syllable in translation before cutting herself off.  
  
“Well, that’s nice to hear~!”  
  
I pause, expecting her to say something else, but nothing comes. Misha glances over at Shizune and Shizune just looks up at me quietly, her hands perfectly still.  
  
“Um, at any rate,” I continue, “I  _am_  planning on attending the Festival, but I probably won’t be at a hundred percent, so depending on how I’m feeling it might not be for very long.”  
  
Shizune takes a second to think before responding, but eventually she signs her response with a smile. “That’s good, Iwacchan,” Misha translates. “The entire student body has been working hard for weeks to put this event together~! Misha and I in particular have been working until after dark all week to ensure that the Festival goes smoothly! We know this hasn’t been the week you’ve wanted it to be, but after all that’s happened it would be a tragedy if you had to miss out on the Festival just because—“  
  
Misha suddenly cuts off mid-translation, and it instinctively causes me to break eye contact to glance at her. She’s gaping at Shizune, aghast, and once the student council president notices she’s lost my attention she turns and sees the expression for herself.  
  
“Um,” I mumble, confused, “Yes? Just because  _what_?”  
  
My attempt to prompt them to continue goes seemingly ignored, though, because Misha’s hands erupt in a flurry of signs and within seconds the two of them are having a lively, completely closed-off discussion again.  
  
I’m not really sure what the etiquette is for watching a conversation in sign, particularly when you can’t understand even a word, but I can’t help but stare as the two of them sign to each other at such a frantic pace that I’d be inclined to call it an argument if I knew any better. Shizune is sternly narrowing her gaze at Misha as she signs with very sweeping, deliberate movements, while Misha signs back with flickering, bombastic motions, looking almost depressed. Or maybe disappointed? I’m not sure. Neither emotion seems to suit her well.  
  
It’s the first time I’ve ever seen any discord between them, and it’s a bit unsettling, since they seemed like such good friends before. I know that they’re tired and stressed out from the work they’ve been putting in, but this seems like it’s about something else.  
  
…I’m the cause of this argument somehow, aren’t I? I feel like I’m seeing the surface of a deeper problem. It was painfully obvious even a week ago that Shizune and Misha were not equally receptive to me as a person, and since my mishap in the hallway on Wednesday, something seems to have gone very sour.  
  
Try as I might, though, it’s impossible to decipher anything about the argument besides those generalities. And I’m not sure I want to get myself any more involved than I already am.  
  
Sighing, I scoot myself back against the car seat and go back to watching the road pass by. The dog I was staring at earlier has already been left long behind us, and I feel an abstract, childish pang of regret.  
  
As I’m beginning to tune out again, a low, bass-filled whisper rings out beside me. “ <Psst, hey.>”  
  
I turn to Mr. Ufu, slightly angling his head to face me, though his eyes are still safely on the road.  
  
 _Is he trying to get my attention without the Student Council noticing?_  
  
He briefly meets my eyes before focusing back on the road. “ <Mellow out, kiddo,>” he murmurs. “<They aren’t talking about you.>”  
  
The words kind of float in front of me for a moment before they fully sink in. Once it occurs to me what he’s talking about, my eyes widen.  
  
“<You can…?>”  
  
“<Oh, yeah,>” he whispers back. “<I’m  _very_  good.>”  
  
Mr. Ufu winks at me, then turns back toward the road, as if the exchange never happened at all.  
  
The more I ponder his words, though, they sound increasingly unlikely.  _He can read sign language backwards, through a rearview mirror, while driving? Just how long has he_  been  _at this? I’m not sure if he’s being serious or just trying to make me feel better about the whole thing._  
  
For the rest of the time that the vehicle rumbles down the road, everything is silent. That is to say, there’s not even any signing going on in the backseat, at least going by the stillness in the corners of my eyes—I haven’t wanted to do anything as suggestive as glance back at them, particularly if there’s a chance that it could reignite whatever weird fight they were having.  
  
Mr. Ufu doesn’t hint me in any further on what’s going on, either; his eyes remain firmly locked on the road for the rest of the trip, though he does take out his cell phone at a stop light to apparently send a text message to someone.  
  
A few minutes out from our arrival at the school, I succumb to my curiosity and quickly glance at the backseat, pretending to watch a building go by, but I’m surprised and confused by what I find. Misha is leaning her head, staring wistfully out the window, and Shizune has a notepad in her hand, upon which she is writing something out very intently. Neither of them looks angry; they just don’t seem involved in each other at all.  
  
 _Is everything okay with these two, or…?_  
  
As I turn back my head the thought strikes me that, for all I’ve heard and seen about Shizune, I know comparatively little about Misha, even though she’s the only one I can really speak to. For all her obstreperousness, she doesn’t seem like such a bad person, but all I really know about her is that she’s my classmate who translates for Shizune. (Which, in and of itself, is more than a little strange, because, well… She’s a classmate, providing a valuable service. You’d think she should be collecting a paycheck or something for that, even if she enjoys doing it for free.)  
  
Of course, this is none of my business—and as somebody still lamenting the lost anonymity of my own condition, it would be hypocritical of me to poke my nose where it didn’t belong—but I  _am_  concerned about the relationship of these two where it pertains to the seating arrangement in our classroom. If the Student Council isn’t getting along now, potentially as a result of something related to my hospitalization, my seat in the classroom might become a drama fallout zone.  
  
That’s assuming, of course, that that isn’t exactly what it already is.  
  
I sit in silence for the remainder of the ride, which really isn’t very long. It’s only a minute or so before the familiar Yamaku Academy gate, the one that I struggled through with Mother not even a week ago, comes into view right outside my window.  
  
…I’m surprised, then, to realize that four students I’ve never seen before are earnestly waiting for us along the sidewalk. Actually, that’s not true. One of them is the somewhat cute boy in my class, the one with the cane. I’ve never so much as exchanged two words with him, so I have no idea why he or any of the other students would be waiting out here for me.  
  
I glance over to Mr. Ufu with a wry smile. “Is this my welcoming committee?”  
  
He chuckles, a deep, dog-grunting sort of sound. “Nah, it’s mine. My work is never done,” Mr. Ufu sighs. Pulling on an odd lever to lower the wheelchair ramp, he gives me a gruff smile. “Well, Miss Daidouji, have a pleasant afternoon.”  
  
“Thank you very much for the ride.”  
  
“No problem,” he says as I begin to step out of the van. “If you ever need a ride down the hill, there’s a sign-in sheet in the first floor hallway.”  
  
“Oh,” I say, not really understanding what he means. “Uh, thanks.”  
  
As I step onto the concrete sidewalk, I glance briefly at that boy from my class, and he looks at me in complete shock, as though I’m drenched in blood or something. But it passes quickly and he looks away as he walks right past me without a word and takes the seat I just vacated. Once Misha and Shizune clear the entrance ramp, the other three students file in, and the ramp collapses itself again.  
  
I guess they weren’t my welcoming committee after all. Not that that explains the weird look that Cute Cane Boy gave me.  
  
“Bye, Mr. Ufu~! Have a good weekend!” Misha says, waving at him through the windshield. It’s the first time I’ve heard her voice in a few minutes.  
  
Since she’s apparently talking again, I feel like it’s safe to ask where all those students are going. “Misha, what was all that about?”  
  
She looks at me guardedly. “What do you  _mean_ , Iwacchan?”  
  
“Those students. Where’s he taking them?”  
  
Her expression slackens, and the silly smile with which I’ve gotten used to seeing her come back. “Oh~! Mr. Ufu is dropping those kids off in town. It’s kind of a long walk down a hill otherwise, and it’s the only place around where you can buy essentials and things, so a lot of the students here ask him for a ride!”  
  
I nod. “Oh, really? That’s convenient.”  
  
 _Now Cute Cane Boy being there makes more sense…_  
  
“Haha~! Yep, but we only have the one shuttle, so it’s always getting tied up when a student has to be driven to a doctor’s appointment or something. I never sign up, Iwacchan. I’d feel too guilty.”  
  
 _Guilty? Why, because she can walk unassisted?  
  
….Come to think of it, does Misha even_  have  _a disability?_  
  
Watching the van take off again and disappear, though, I push these questions from my mind, because I’m trying to figure out where I’m expected to go, or what I’m expected to do from here. I guess I should ask Shizune, but after their spat in the van, I’m reluctant to force Misha and Shizune to interact.  
  
I guess it’s a Saturday, so this is my own time with which to do whatever I want? It doesn’t seem right, though…  
  
I move to open the gate, but then I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I turn around. The owner of the hand turns out to be Shizune, who reluctantly meets my eyes as she begins signing.  
  
“Iwacchan, before you go,” Misha translates, “Nurse has asked to speak with you. We have instructions to take you to his office before letting you go.”  
  
 _Nothing in life is ever that easy, I suppose._  
  
“Why does he want to speak to me?”  
  
Misha shrugs, apparently on Shizune’s behalf. “We don’t know, Iwacchan! It’s just something students do when they return from the hospital, I guess~!”  
  
I guess that makes sense, but I’m not really in the mood to speak to him. Though, if I’m being honest with myself, I don’t really feel like speaking to anybody right now.  
  
“I guess we can’t keep him waiting, then,” I sigh.  
  
We walk from the gate to the Administrative Building without so much as a trickle of conversation. Whatever happened in the van between the two members of the student council soured me on carrying on a chat with them (or talking about the Festival, in particular), and Shizune and Misha aren’t being particularly chatty, either.  
  
Even the birds have started to clam down now that it’s midday. Though I’m pettily dismayed to find another pair of swallows overhead as we pass beneath the branch of an overgrown poplar tree, one of them suddenly seems to remember an urgent appointment and takes flight, leaving the other one quietly behind.  
  
The school grounds, though, are full of students milling about, and when they notice my incongruent school uniform, more than a few of them look at me with the same kind of surprised expression Cute Cane Boy gave me. It’s different from the puzzled, curious glances I got on my first few days here; the students really are looking at me like they read my obituary this morning. Clearly, something has changed since Ibarazaki bashed into me on Wednesday.  
  
The Administrative Building, conversely, is kind of refreshing in that it’s almost entirely deserted. In fact, the only open door in the entire hallway is the one to the Nurse’s office. I guess it’s not surprising that he would be the only staff member still around on the afternoon before a big festival. Most of the faculty is probably accustomed to having Sundays off, and if they have to show up tomorrow for the event I can’t see why they’d want to linger around much longer on a Saturday afternoon.  
  
As we’re approaching the door, Misha marches ahead and raps rather loudly on it, despite it clearly being open. Knowing that nobody ever seems to notice when I do it, I allow myself a deep sigh.  
  
“Nurse, we brought you Iwacchan~!”  
  
“Awesome, thanks,” I hear from inside the office. “That’s all I need. You girls have a great weekend.”  
  
“We will~!” Misha says, her voice disorientingly chipper in light of her earlier argument. “You too!”  
  
When she turns back to me, I take note of the rather tepid smile on her face. It’s a pretty steep departure from how I’m used to seeing her, and it’s especially saddening, like watching a dancer fall down during a choreographed performance.  
  
“Bye, Iwacchan~!” she says, handing me back my bags. “See you later! Take care!”  
  
“I’ll try. You too, Misha.”  
  
With one last smile, she begins to make her exit down the hallway, and I turn to give a farewell—not an especially warm one—to Shizune, but when I look over, she puts her hand out like she wants to shake mine.  
  
Confused, I put my hand out, but rather than shake it, she places something in my hand. Closing my hand around it, I can feel that it’s some kind of note.  
  
I meet her eyes—always a somewhat daunting prospect, but I can see now that there’s a surprisingly disarming warmth to them here. She gives me a wan smile and a knowing nod, and disappears after Misha.  
  
 _I’m not really sure what’s going on…_  
  
I try to wash all thoughts of them from my mind as I reluctantly step into the nurse’s office. With any luck, that’s the last time I’ll have to worry about them. I don’t have time to read Shizune’s note right now, so I stick it inside my jacket pocket and walk into the office.


	15. Blood Pressure

“So you wanted to see me?”  
  
“Hey there, Daidouji,” Nurse says, glancing over at me with the coltish smile that I’m coming to realize is characteristic. “It’s good to see you. Have a seat.”  
  
He gestures over to a molded-plastic chair positioned to face his desk, which I sit down in without a word. He spends another minute quietly typing away at his computer screen before he finally turns to me.  
  
“So how was your stay at the hospital?”  
  
“Fine, I suppose. Nothing to write home about.”  
  
His smile seems to falter for the briefest fraction of a second, but then it returns so quickly I barely even notice it happened.  
  
“Great. I’m glad to hear that,” he says, tapping a pencil on the desk. “We don’t usually get a whole lot of complaints.”  
  
“That’s… good.”  
  
He pulls some blank forms out from a drawer on his desk and turns his office chair to face me directly, resting his free hand on his knees. “Anyway, this shouldn’t take too long. It’s just the school policy when we get a student back from the hospital. I just need to take your vitals for our own reference and then the rest of the weekend is yours.”  
  
“That’s fine,” I say.  
  
As he gets up out of his chair and closes the hallway door to give us some privacy, I stand up to remove my school blazer so that he can take my blood pressure, something I’ve had done so many times this year that it’s basically second nature now. He quietly wraps the cuff around my arm and inflates it until it’s just beginning to feel uncomfortable.  
  
“So,” he says casually as he slowly releases the air from the cuff, “I never  _was_  able to get a hold of your parents. Is everything okay with them?”  
  
 _Great, my favorite topic._  “Oh. Yes,” I answer, keeping my tone light. “I spoke with my mother on Thursday. She… understands what happened.”  
  
“I see…” He jots my diastolic blood pressure on his chart, and then there’s a sharp  _rip_  of the fasteners as he pulls the cuff off. “Where  _is_ your mother, if you don’t mind my asking?”  
  
 _As a matter of fact, I do. Lay off._  
  
Of course, I don’t actually say that.  
  
“One of her friends ran into some trouble abroad,” I say, fabricating the lie completely by the seat of my nonexistent pants. “She had to leave on rather short notice to help get her out of it.”  
  
 _There,_  I think.  _That’s not too far off from reality._  
  
The Nurse quirks an eyebrow at me while he reaches to pull a thermometer out of a cabinet. “ _Trouble abroad?_  What, did your mom’s friend get caught smuggling narcotics or something?”  
  
“Maybe,” I admit—or pretend to admit. “It’s not any of my business.”  
  
“Yeah, that’s probably a good attitude to have,” he says, forming the grin of a middle-school boy who thinks he’s clever. “You wouldn’t want to become an accessory after the fact, I don’t think.”  
  
“No,” I say, presenting him with my best attempt at an appreciative smile. “Definitely not.”  
  
He hands me the electronic thermometer, placing the probe in my palm for me to place in my mouth myself. I watch disinterestedly as the number on the display crawls slowly up to thirty-seven degrees and determinedly sits there another thirty seconds until the machine beeps and the Nurse quickly scribbles down a few more measurements.  
  
“Cool. Perfect score. Just one more thing, okay? I need you to get on that scale.”  
  
He waves over at a hospital scale in the corner of the room, over by the room divider where students usually rest during class.  
  
I blink at him incredulously. “You need to take down my  _weight_?”  
  
He shrugs sheepishly. “It’s an entry on the chart. Just bear with me, here.”  
  
Sighing, I slip off my flats and step onto the scale, and the nurse gets to work adjusting the weight sliders back and forth.  
  
Though I don’t see the point of this, I’d be lying if I claimed I wasn’t a little curious what the number was. I haven’t stepped on a scale since some time before my heart attack, when I wasted away a little.  
  
 _My weight before my heart attack was about forty-three kilograms, so now it should be about… I don’t know. Forty-one?_  
  
“Thirty-eight point-one kilograms,” the Nurse says, scribbling the number down.  
  
 _…Or that._  
  
I don’t even realize that I’m blinking at him, dumbfounded, until he meets my eyes and gives me a tired expression. “Why do you look so surprised?”  
  
As I step off the scale, I break eye contact with him, slipping back into my shoes and staring at the floor. “It’s… just lower than I was expecting.”  
  
“Hmm. Is it really, now?”  
  
 _What? What does he mean by that?_  I look back up at him, into his eyes, but his expression looks somewhere between blank and disappointed, like how a bird looks when it realizes you aren’t leaving it any crumbs.  
  
“You can go ahead and sit back down,” he says, much of the jovial tone trickling out of his voice. “I’d like to have a little chat with you before I let you go, if you don’t mind.”  
  
Something about the seriousness in his tone is giving me chills… It’s like some instrument suddenly belted out a series of chords in a minor key.  
  
“Um. Okay…” I say, as I walk back from the scale and sink back down into the molded-plastic chair.  
  
“All right, so, here’s the deal. I know that the last time we spoke, I asked you to get some exercise, but for the time being, I’m actually going to have to ask you to  _avoid_  any kind of exertion for at least another week. Between your heart and that concussion of yours, we don’t want to take any risks. If you tripped while running or something…”  
  
“Sure,” I nod. “That makes sense.”  _Okay, nothing bad so far…_  
  
“However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t things you can start doing to improve your health,” he continues. “For one thing, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, you’re dangerously underweight.”  
  
 _…And_  there’s  _the other shoe._  I have to stop myself from letting my jaw drop.  
  
“ _Dangerously_  underweight?”  
  
“Oh, yeah,” he says dryly, his expression not even slightly amused. “And I’d add that that’s dangerously underweight for  _somebody without a heart condition._  The low end of the healthy range for a girl of your height and build is something like forty kilograms.”  
  
“And that’s… a huge problem, then?”  
  
He narrows his eyes at me like I just blew him the raspberry. “It can be. The chart of healthy ranges can sometimes be a little arbitrary, but they’re usually a pretty decent guideline. Your hospital records from February had you weighing it at forty-three point-four. To your knowledge, is that accurate?”  
  
I furrow my brow, bemused. I don’t remember that at all.  _When did that hospital weigh me? Did they put me on a bed scale while I was out?_  
  
I can’t help but feel like there’s more to it than just this. This line of questioning is making me uneasy. I take a moment to study his eyes before I answer. “I… suppose, yes.”  
  
“So what you’re saying is that in four months, you lost more than a tenth of your body weight?”  
  
The accusatory tone in his voice makes me stiffen in my seat. “I just… haven’t had much of an appetite, that’s all.”  
  
If I’m being honest with myself, I’ve kind of given up on ever gaining that weight back. I mean, that’s why I made the fashion choices I did when Mother and I went to the shopping center together. Frankly, I haven’t even worn a brassiere since before my heart attack, just a snug camisole.  
  
“Loss of appetite, huh?”  
  
“Well, yes,” I say placatingly. “That’s one of the side effects of my medications, isn’t it?”  
  
“Your medications? Technically yes. But another is weight  _gain. Another_  is erectile dysfunction. So… see where I’m going with this?”  
  
I gape at him, perplexed. Then suddenly it hits me.  
  
“You don’t—you’re not trying to suggest I have an  _eating disorder_ ,are you?”  
  
 _Dear lord. I need the nurse thinking that like I need a gut wound._  If he communicated such suspicions to my mother, she’d lose her mind thinking she was somehow responsible. Because, were it true, she almost certainly  _would_  be.  
  
He shakes his head, though. “An eating disorder? No. Nothing quite so complicated…” He flips through his notes. “Tell me, are you dealing with stress responsibly?”  
  
 _Ugh. This again?_  
  
“Y, yeah,” I answer. “It’s like I told you on Wednesday, I’m fine.”  
  
“You’re sticking to your guns, then?”  
  
“ _What_  guns? I said I was fine,” I snap, starting to get agitated. “Weren’t we talking about my weight loss?”  
  
He meets my eyes and sighs, glancing at his desk. “Yeah. We were.”  
  
“So… is that still happening?”  
  
“No. Not exactly,” he says, digging through a drawer in his computer desk. After a moment, he pulls out a small sheaf of business cards neatly held together with a rubber band and hands me the one on top. “I want you to hold onto this.”  
  
He’s holding it out to me like it’s a slice of processed cheese, not the way it’s meant to be done in formal settings, a process I’ve learned a lot about from my father. From that it seems pretty obvious that it’s not his own card, not that I’d warrant such formality if it was. Gingerly, I take the card between my thumb and forefinger.  
  
The card is chalk-white, embossed with the Yamaku Foundation emblem and printed in an ultramodern sans-serif font.  _Yamaku Academy,_  the first line reads, in the largest print. Below that in a marginally smaller text is the name  _Yumi Takawa, MD._  And below that, in a more squat typeface, the words  _Board Certified Psychiatrist.  
  
…A psychiatrist…?  
  
A_  psychiatrist _?!_  
  
Swept with a wave of indignation, I stand up straight out of my chair. “What am I supposed to do with  _this_?”  
  
“That’s a colleague of mine,” he answers, gesturing to the card. “Her office is a few floors up from here. I’d like you to consider speaking to her, since you’re obviously unwilling to be open about anything with  _me_.”  
  
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, my body stiffening.  
  
“Yes,  _you do_ ,” he says, leaning forward slightly in his chair. “If you’re not comfortable being honest with me about what’s going on with you, that’s fine. I’m not going to hold you in this room and twist your arm until that changes. But please, don’t insult my intelligence and tell me that nothing’s wrong, because I  _know_  that isn’t true.”  
  
That’s when I figure out what I’m doing here, what  _he’s_  doing, and my body starts to get hot with anxiety.  _This isn’t a routine check-up. It’s his best attempt at an intervention._  
  
I’m a good liar. A decent actress, even, when I bother to be. It’s an ability I’ve honed from a childhood full of avoided confrontations, a lifetime of trying my hardest to keep people I don’t trust or don’t like from peering too deeply into my life. As I’ve become an adult, I can’t recall many occasions in which I’ve given someone the room to call me out on one of those lies. I must be out of practice. That, or he’s cheating somehow.  
  
It’s hard to keep my composure, but I try to keep my expression guarded. “Why… why are you convinced?”  
  
He raises an eyebrow at me in a gesture of mild impatience and sets his hands on his knees. “You’ve tried your best to hide it,” he answers coolly. “Maybe that’s the only way you know how to manage it. But you’re asking me to believe that over the course of four months you’ve suffered two near-death experiences, discovered your life-threatening chronic illness, and been totally uprooted from home, yet in spite of all that, everything’s peachy. Sorry, that’s a tough sell.”  
  
“I never said—“  
  
“…And based on the fact that I’ve been flooding your parents with voice mail messages and emails and haven’t even gotten so much as a text in response, it looks like your  _support network_  is a complete farce, as well. So, no, unless you’re a robot, I don’t think things are really as rosy as you’re pretending they are.”  
  
“And based on this, you’re going to make me to see a psychiatrist?”  
  
“No. I don’t see the point in forcing you to do anything.” The Nurse exhales, tapping his forehead pensively with the back of his pen before continuing. “Daidouji… when you get right down to it, I have one job: looking after the health of the students who attend this school. And in order for me to do that job effectively, I need those students to be honest with me about their problems. And if one of those students won’t be honest with me, I need her to be honest with  _somebody_.”  
  
“I suppose I don’t really see how anything that’s going on in my life is any of your business.”  
  
“It’s my business because loss of appetite and weight loss are two major symptoms of clinical depression, and at your current weight, with your heart condition, you’re basically a disaster waiting to happen,” he answers sternly. “If they’re connected, and they very well might be, then yes, I’d say you need help. Because if keep you doing this, just burying your problems, eventually you’re going to break. Physically  _or_  mentally.”  
  
 _Where does he get off?!_  I narrow my eyes with irritation, feeling the blood pumping in my face. No. I take a deep breath.  _Calm down._  I don’t know if he’s winding me up unintentionally, but it’s happening.  
  
“So because I don’t feel like talking about my life with  _you_ , that automatically means I’m burying my problems?”  
  
“Have you been talking about  _anything_  with  _anybody_?”  
  
“That isn’t any of your business.”  
  
“So probably not, then.”  
  
My blood reaches its boiling point, and my heart seems to crash back and forth.  _I’m going to lose it if I let him get to me._  
  
Briskly, I stand up out of my chair. “If I walk out of this room right now, are you going to stop me?”  
  
He looks at me with sad eyes. And then he sighs. “Daidouji… you aren’t my prisoner. If that’s really what you want to do, go ahead, but you can’t escape this conversation forever.”  
  
I ignore that comment. It’s just another attempt at drawing me out. I pick up my school bag off the ground, leaving the nurse’s duffel bag under the chair where I left it. He’ll see it eventually.  
  
As I move to open the door, I realize I’m still holding the business card he gave me. I absently set it down on the grey surface of a fax machine, but The Nurse’s voice rings out almost as soon as I do.  
  
“Daidouji,” he says, his voice softer, “would you at least take that card with you?”  
  
“No,” I say flatly, my hand on the door handle, not meeting his eyes. “I’m not going to need it.”  
  
“Could you please take it anyway? In case you change your mind?”  
  
I glare at him. “I’m not  _going_  to change my mind!”  
  
Before he can say anything else, I’ve swung the door open and rushed down the hallway. I don’t stop moving my legs until I’ve gotten to the end of the arched corridor and out through the double doors to the fresh air outside. And even then, the concrete path under my feet blurs as I rush as far away from the administrative building as possible.  
  
 _To hell with him,_  I think, almost hyperventilating with exertion and anxiety.  _To_  hell  _with him for poking his nose into my life! For thinking he had any right! He’s just a damn_  nurse _!_  
  
As my pace slackens to a standstill, I finally take a long, calming breath, but I almost panic again until I spin around and confirm that nobody’s following me. I don’t know why anybody would be. But storming out of the nurse’s office felt too easy, like this is all some complex game to trap me someplace.  
  
 _I… I don’t know. I feel like I shouldn’t have done that… But I couldn’t have stayed in there. I was starting to feel like I felt when Ibarazaki invaded my room._  
  
I have no idea what’s going to happen from here. I doubt that this is the last I’ll hear about it from him.  _Is_  he going to force me to see a psychiatrist? Does he think I need to be put on suicide watch or something? I don’t really know how much control he can exert over my life if he’s so inclined. All the more reason to continue keeping him firmly out of it.  
  
Looking around at my surroundings, at the sunlit, verdant path between the administrative building and the girls’ dorms, it occurs to me that… I’m free. I’m not bound to my hospital room, not legally obligated to be anywhere. I suppose that means I’m back to being just an ordinary student again, but… nothing really feels right. Theoretically I’ll be back to class on Monday, but with the way I just burst out of the Nurse’s office, it doesn’t feel like it. I don’t feel… like I belong here, I guess. Like I should have listened to my previous inclinations and gotten on the bullet train to Tokyo.  
  
But failing that? I’m not really sure. I suppose I’ll head back to my dorm room. I’m not sure where else I’d go, short of wandering somewhere totally aimlessly.  
  
The pathway is unusually quiet as I make my way to the dorm complex. I only walk past one student before getting to the building, and he’s so involved in what he’s doing with his cellphone that he hardly even notices me. I’m not really sure where everybody is right now, but it only makes me feel even more unsettled. Like I’m not supposed to be out here.  
  
Lately I don’t feel very much like the person I thought I was supposed to be.


	16. 2 Become 1

When I get closed to the dorm building, I’m startled to see that one of the raised walls by the steps is covered with what appears to be some kind of neo-surrealist abortion in progress. I almost think I’ve gotten lost, but upon closer inspection it becomes clear that, no, there’s just a huge, scatterbrained mural on the wall that wasn’t there before I was hospitalized.  
  
Unusually, there’s some boy performing what looks like a dubious style of tai chi or aerobics along one end of the wall. It’s only as I get closer that I realize she’s a girl, not a boy, and that she’s not doing tai chi, and that she  _doesn’t have arms_. Sometimes I get so caught up in my own worries and struggles that I forget that there are some  _really strange_  people attending this school.  
  
Walking towards the stairs a few feet from where she’s standing, I realize that the reason she’s moving so strangely is because she’s painting the wall with her feet, a paintbrush wedged between her toes. It looks more like performance art than art, and I can’t help but stare at it for a few minutes as she goes along. She’s too involved in her work to notice me, it seems, and it’s not like I have anything to say anyway.  
  
After a few moments, I get bored watching her, though—watching somebody paint isn’t that interesting; watching somebody paint  _with their feet_  only marginally more so. And, given the day’s events, I’m not really in the mood to sit around and stare anyway. I continue to proceed to the dorms.  
  
“I need your help.”  
  
Her voice comes out so suddenly and so out of nowhere that I jump. I turn my head, thinking she  _must_  be speaking to somebody else, but there’s nobody else around. When I look back at her, she’s looking straight at me with deep green eyes that vaguely remind me of beer bottles viewed from below.  
  
“I’m sorry?”  
  
“I don’t know what you did, but I forgive you. But you have to help,” she says, her eyes pleading.  
  
“I— _what_?”  
  
“I have two paints that I can’t use. I need for them to be one paint I  _can_  use.”  
  
The words are delivered as matter-of-factly as the opening sentence of an inane math problem, and I’m struck speechless for a moment while I attempt to decipher what the hell she means.  
  
“You… need me to mix paint for you? Right now?”  
  
“Now is good. Later is less good. And tomorrow is too late.”  
  
 _Is she messing with me?_  I stare at her, bug-eyed.  
  
“I’m sorry,  _what?”_  
  
“The paint,” the strange girl replies dryly. “It would have been better to have it earlier, but you weren’t here then. Now is best, yes.”  
  
“I don’t… I don’t really know the first thing about mixing paint.”  
  
“Oh, that’s easy,” she says, her expression blank. “The first thing about mixing paint is to take two or more colors of paint and pour them into the same container.”  
  
…I continue to stare at her.  
  
“Actually,” she says thoughtfully, “I think that may be the only thing about mixing paint. So you’re set.”  
  
I’m about to attempt a response to that when I’m hit with a sudden sense of uncertainty.  _Wait,_  I think nervously,  _does somebody_  know  _she’s painting this wall?_  
  
Full of dread, I glance over to the mural suspiciously, but upon a more reasoned analysis, I decide that too much of the mural has already been completed for this to simply be a random act of vandalism by an incredibly weird person. Or, at least, that’s what I reassure myself, in spite of the fact that she’s currently painting the nude breasts of what appears to be a disembodied torso.  
  
 _Is… is this real life?_  
  
“I—um—alright,” I say, finally, if only because refusing to help a disabled person asking you for assistance is something like the dictionary definition of a jerk move. “I’ll help.”  
  
With all the apprehension of a doe approaching a handful of salt, I delicately step towards the girl, my caution perhaps a bit absurd in light of how difficult it would probably be for her to hurt me—though on the other hand, I’ve nearly been rent asunder by less imposing figures than her. Still, though, there’s not much that’s outwardly threatening about this girl, other than the fact that she is quite possibly, for the lack of a better word, freaking bananas.  
  
Well, I suppose she might just be an almost totally normal girl who’s just utterly in love with her own cleverness. Or what she perceives as cleverness. Answers questions as literally as possible just to be a pain in the neck, that sort of thing. But… that doesn’t seem quite right.  
  
There are two fat metal cylinders glistening in the sun, which I gesture to. “These two cans?”  
  
“No. Just this one,” she says, tapping one of the cans with her feet, “and that one over there.” She swings her foot in a direction and I can vaguely make out the can she’s pointing at a few meters away.  
  
“Fine,” I say, walking over to grab the wayward can. It’s a lot heavier than it looks, and I find myself grunting in a less-than-ladylike tone under my breath as I heave it over to where the girl is standing. I guess that with all that weight I lost over my hospitalization, I lost what little muscle tone I had, too.  
  
 _Why am I even doing this…? This is so stupid._  
  
I don’t really like walking in the grass, either. There’s painting supplies everywhere, and I would hate to unexpectedly splash paint onto the bottom of my shoes.  
  
Setting the can on the ground, and taking a moment to shake the numbness out of my arms, I look up at the girl. She’s just standing over me, watching me with what is quite possibly the most unreadable expression I’ve ever seen. I don’t even know if it’s  _blank_ , per se. It’s almost animalistic, sort of, like an owl or something. Like an owl that really, really wants you to turn off the lights.  
  
“So… how should I get these open?”  
  
Wordlessly, she turns away, and I have a moment to look at her a bit closer. She’s got a few centimeters of height on me, and she’s sort of gangly and bony and androgynous in a manner that reminds me a little of that British supermodel from the sixties, but not necessarily in a  _good_  way. Her hair’s kind of a disaster too, a utilitarian, vaguely page boy-esque cut that practically demands a comb through it in spite of how easy it must be to maintain. The color’s the only good thing about it, this rich auburn shade that seems to catch the afternoon sunlight in just the right way.  
  
I wouldn’t call her a  _complete_  mess—or maybe I would, but with the caveat that it all seems to work for her, in some twisted, totally unorthodox way. Like a dilapidated building made beautiful by all the kudzu and moss growing on every surface. Her eyes even  _look_  like moss.  
  
She turns to me, a screwdriver clutched between her toes.  
  
“Use this.”  
  
“Um… Thanks,” I say, gingerly taking the screwdriver from her foot with no small amount of hesitation. Though it’s easy enough to reason that there’s nothing inherently weird about this—it’s like being handed something, though she has no hands—the idea of it still makes me more than a little uncomfortable. You’re not really supposed to be getting so close to another person’s feet unless you’re a shoe salesman or a masseuse.  
  
“So…” I murmur, “I guess I’ll pop these open, then.”  
  
“Seems like a good guess to me.”  
  
Giving her a sidelong glance, I sigh under my breath and kneel down beside the can, trying to keep it as far away from my body as I gently pry it open.  
  
 _Do not splash paint on your clothes, Daidouji._  Do not.  _This is the only school uniform you have right now. Look at the weirdo beside you._  Look at how she’s dressed.  _This is your fate, as well, should you ruin your clothes here._  
  
Gulping, I very gently, and very, very carefully pop the can open. Then, sliding over slightly, I do the same to the other one. It’s easier than it looks, and afterwards I give myself a thorough inspection to ensure I haven’t splashed even a  _mote_  of paint on me.  
  
“I know you.”  
  
I glance over to see the moss-green eyes murkily staring down at me, alight with curiosity.  
  
“Um,” I say lightly, “I’m  _one hundred percent sure_  that you don’t.”  
  
“No, I do. You’re that girl who was dead, and then not dead.”  
  
It’s such an obtuse, unbelievable non sequitur that I almost fall over, my jaw frozen in this perfect expression of silent, overpowering befuddlement.  
  
“I… you…  _what_?!”  
  
“Yes, I can tell by your uniform. You must be the one who died in the hallway. I remember, because it was my friend that killed you. But then… you weren’t dead anymore, but she didn’t come back.”  
  
I feel like I’m going crazy. It  _should_  be total nonsense, but what she’s describing  _almost_  makes sense in this kind of unintentionally allegorical way.  
  
 _So this girl is Ibarazaki’s friend? I’m not sure if that makes me like Ibarazaki even less._  
  
“I didn’t die on Wednesday,” I say, resisting the urge to use the tone I’d take with a child—it’s  _such_  an absurd comment to make unironically. “I nearly had a fatal heart attack, but they stopped it before it started. I was just knocked out, that’s all.”  
  
“Oh,” she says, blinking—she’s reminiscent of the pop-out headlights some cars have. “That’s much less interesting than being able to rise from the dead.”  
  
I roll my eyes. “I’m sorry to disappoint. Would you like me to mix the paint now?”  
  
She ignores my question, seemingly fixated on this new subject of a conversation I don’t remember volunteering for. “Where is Emi, then?”  
  
 _I swear, Ibarazaki seems to follow me everywhere. I can’t escape her._  
  
I take a deep, patient breath to re-center myself. “Ibarazaki is suspended. She’ll be back in a week or so. I think she’s with her mother.”  
  
“Oh,” she says. “That’s very inconvenient.”  
  
I narrow my eyes. “Well, she  _did_  injure me somewhat severely…”  
  
“I haven’t had a lunch in a while,” she says pensively. “Now a different girl helps me get dressed in the morning, and it feels very strange. Like accidentally putting on another person’s shoes, or sitting down in a chair that’s warm from somebody else’s bottom.”  
  
It’s impossible to follow any of that, so I don’t even try. “That… sounds like a problem,” I offer meaninglessly. “So, about this paint…”  
  
“I may get used to it if she continues to help, though. But getting used to it would be strange. Like wearing somebody else’s shoes for so long that they become  _your_  shoes. But you’re not the same anymore, because your shoes were intended for another person.”  
  
“Right. Shoes,” I mumble, bereft of a thoughtful way to contribute to the discussion. “Um. Yes, you shouldn’t wear someone else’s. They probably wouldn’t fit anyway.”  
  
 _I feel like such a tool right now. Why am I still here?_  
  
“…Do you have a name? Or should I call you Dead-Not-Dead Girl?”  
  
“N, no,” I stammer, the abrupt change in subject throwing me off balance yet again. “My name is Iwanako Daidouji.”  
  
“I see,” she says, nodding with more understanding than that statement really needs. “I’m Rin. Tezuka Rin. Rin Tezuka.”  
  
“It’s very nice to make your acquaintance.”  
  
She pauses. “It is? I thought it was simply acceptable. I didn’t know my acquaintance came so highly rated.”  
  
 _Oh my god this is what going mad feels like._  
  
“So, Daidouji, why are you here?”  
  
“Lately,” I mutter, mercifully oblivious to the context of the question, “I find myself asking that question several times a day.”  
  
“Is that your problem?”  
  
“Quite possibly,” I admit absently, no longer paying much attention to the question.  
  
Tezuka wrinkles her forehead and makes a face like she found a mummified rat in her basement. “Hmm. That’s troublesome. I don’t know how to categorize that. Do you have another one?”  
  
“Wait, wait,” I say, holding my hand up, “what are we even talking about again?”  
  
“I think we’re only talking about it once, but I collect people and I like to get interesting ones.”  
  
“You  _collect_  people?”  
  
“People with different problems.”  
  
 _Wait, she’s talking about people with_  disabilities _?!_  How staggeringly brazen. I’m pretty sure this is the most tactless girl I’ve ever met in my life, and I know some strong contenders for that position already.  
  
“I don’t really talk about those with people I’ve just met for the first time, sorry,” I say, rolling my eyes.  
  
“I see,” she says dully, her expression still somewhere on the corner of blank and cavalier. “That’s too bad. Let me know when you’ve met me enough times.”  
  
 _I’m so over this._  If this were any other moment in my life, there’s no way I would have subjected myself to this sort of behavior for so long, but I’m having another of those increasingly common days where my life seems to make only slightly more sense than the Unabomber manifesto and I’ve lost my point of reference for the limits of what I’ll find acceptable.  
  
“Tezuka,” I say exasperatedly, almost speaking through my teeth, “would you still like me to mix these paints for you?”  
  
There’s a tense moment where she doesn’t seem to have heard what I just said. Finally, though, mercifully, her eyes widen and her lips part with shock and worry. “Yes. You need to do that. I  _absolutely positively_  must finish this today.”  
  
 _Thank the gods._  I sigh with palpable amounts of relief. “So do you want me to pour it in this basin?”  
  
“No,” she shakes her head, her hair flying back and forth. “Pour it in this one,” she says, kicking one toward me. Thankfully, there’s no paint in it to splash on me.  
  
Again making certain that I’m very, very careful, I daintily pry off the lid of the can and begin pouring the paint delicately in the basin.  
  
“Stop. Stop there.”  
  
“That’s enough?”  
  
“It is. Now the other one.”  
  
Silently shaking my head, I place the lid back on the can and take the other one, setting its lid aside and pouring the paint slowly into the basin, where it swirls and mixes with the other color. I might find it beautiful if my day wasn’t insisting on hammering me over the head with encounters like the ones I’ve been having. I can almost feel my concussion coming back.  
  
“Stop.”  
  
“Okay,” I say, setting the can down and sticking the lid back on, careful not to get any of the paint on my fingers by clutching it with fallen leaves from the nearby tree. “Is that all?”  
  
“No. It’s only a portion. I don’t need anymore, though.”  
  
“I… good. Well, have a nice day then, Tezuka.”  
  
“That’s a good idea. I think I’ll have it in a few weeks.”  
  
 _Okay, whatever. I’m walking away before she filibusters me with an anecdote about mantis shrimps or something._  
  
I move toward the steps to the dorms, checking behind me to make sure she’s not beckoning me back for some other asinine task, but she’s already fully engaged in her work, once again ignoring everything else around her.  
  
 _What a disturbing person._  
  
I never thought I’d be so glad to be back in the dorm building. So far, this day has been a vicious gauntlet of some of the most inscrutable, obnoxious people I’ve ever met in my life. My headache is whistling back into consciousness, and all I want to do is lie down and listen to a smooth jazz album or something.  
  
…I don’t even  _like_  smooth jazz, but it just seems like the kind of thing you’re supposed to listen to if nothing makes sense anymore and you’re still nursing a brain injury.  _Something_  downtempo, anyway.  
  
‘Downtempo.’ That’s a good word for what I’d really like my life to start being.


	17. Macrocosmetology

The doors push open with a satisfying  _whoosh_. The rush of cooled air that flows over me as I walk into the vaguely medical-looking hallway feels like the promise of sanctuary. For the next day or so, at least, I can seclude myself in here and not be bothered by anybody. No medical staff stealing my blood while I’m sleeping, no Nurse to barge unwelcomed into my business, no Student Council with their bitter criticisms and inscrutable quarrels, no mustachioed Doctors dripping with cool condescension, and no armless graffiti artists to drag me towards the limits of my sanity.  
  
I try not to let it bother me that this feels  _wrong_ —after all that time spent in a hospital room and being some flavor of miserable, it seems counterproductive to hole up in a room that’s really only marginally more hospitable—but returning to my room just feels like the only thing that makes sense. Where else would I go? It isn’t like I’m going to shoot baskets in the athletics yard.  
  
Actually, before everything with him went terribly wrong, the Nurse mentioned that I shouldn’t be overexerting myself. That means that even swimming is right out. Oh, well.  
  
If nothing else, though, that’s a great excuse to take the elevator instead of the stairs. Climbing three flights of stairs is a hassle I’d rather not deal with. The elevator isn’t as quick as I’d like, but it’s still considerably better than the alternative.  
  
Turning the corner from the elevator corridor, my bedroom door is a welcoming sight—  
  
“ _Woof_!”  
  
…Oh. Right.  
  
“Ah, that’d be Rocky,” Momomi says cheerily, her cool voice ringing out from behind the half-open door. It opens fully before I get a chance to consider turning around and darting off, and she pokes her head into the hallway, tracing the hallway with sightless eyes that somehow seem to find the general vicinity of my own.  
  
In a strange mimicry of his mistress, Susano’o’s head emerges from the doorway half a meter below Momomi’s. He looks up at me with warm brown eyes and happily lolls his tongue out.  
  
“Um. Hello, Momomi,” I say hesitantly.  
  
“So,” she says with a far-too-amused smirk, “the Prodigal Daughter finally returns, huh?”  
  
“The Prodigal…?” I blink. “That… that isn’t even remotely how that metaphor works.”  
  
The smirk seems to fall from her face as I say this, and she narrows her eyes at me. “Yes, well, trap sprung, Rocky.”  
  
“Trap… what?” I wrinkle my forehead. “What does  _that_  mean?”  
  
“It means you just outed yourself as a dork.”  
  
“ _What_?”  
  
“No worries. I won’t tell a soul,” she says, her smirk returning. “Anyway, you’re just in time. I need you to come in here.”  
  
“Come into your  _room_?”  
  
“No, my parlor,” she says sardonically. “ _Yes_ , my room. I’m going to visit my boyfriend in a little bit and I need somebody good with makeup to give me a hand. Or an eye… and hand. Hand guided by an eye. Whatever.”  
  
“Um,” I blink, “what makes you think I’m so good with makeup?”  
  
She rolls her eyes. “ _Cute_ , Rocky. How about you save it for a  _boy_ , and drag your petite derrière in here?”  
  
“I—“ I pause, sighing. “Fine.”  
  
She grins at me, and I’m so annoyed at letting myself get browbeaten  _again_  that I almost miss out on noticing the expression doesn’t seem even remotely acerbic. Like I’m actually making her day. It’s nicer, at least, than the coldly ambivalent way Tezuka regarded my assistance.  
  
 _I’ve been more helpful to people in the last hour than I’ve been in all the last year…_  
  
“Excellent!” she says, opening the door all the way to let me in. “I was starting to get desperate.”  
  
The room is kind of boring, even compared to mine—the walls are bare and the desk and dresser are mostly unadorned. Her bedspread seems to be the same one all the rooms are outfitted with, with the adjustable bed frame set high enough for her to fit a kennel under the bed, with a food and water bowl for Susano’o. The only really interesting thing about the room is that it smells very strongly of high-end coffee.  
  
Momomi is different, though. With the door open, I can get a better look at her outfit, and I’m surprised: this is the first time I’ve seen her out of that posh silk bathrobe, and… she looks sort of like a sexed-up delinquent. Her (faux?) leather jacket is somewhat menacingly studded, and the vermillion halter top she’s wearing under it does a good job of highlighting those unbelievably stupid curves of hers. Seems about as subtle to me as neon signs on the Washington Monument, but I’m willing to bet her boyfriend likes it. She’s wearing a lot of cheap jewelry too, sharp corners and chrome and unnecessary chains.  
  
It’s ridiculous, actually, I’ll just say it. Frankly, it’d be ridiculous even at one of those bottom-tier high schools in Saitama where this sort of thing is celebrated, but against the quiet, bucolic backdrop of Yamaku Academy, it’s utterly asinine. I don’t get it. Is she into the whole “rebellion” thing? I can’t imagine this girl being friends with Lilly. Actually, seeing her like this, I can’t even imagine her in the  _same room_  as Lilly.  
  
While I’m still staring goggle-eyed at the questionable fashion decisions of my neighbor, she holds her hair out of her face by putting up her sunglasses and pulls out the chair from her desk.  
  
“All right, Rocky. I think that, given our discrepancies in height, you should sit on the bed to do this, but it’s up to you.”  
  
…Something about that request really troubles me, but I can’t seem to pin down why.  
  
“I… fine,” I say without protest, doing my best to scramble onto the impractically high bed. It takes considerably more agility than I’d like it to, and I nearly lose my grip at first, but eventually I’m able to sit on the edge of the bed, my feet not even touching the ground.  
  
 _What a stupid bed_ , I think, smoothing out my skirt and stockings.  
  
Momomi positions her chair to face me, and I find it annoys me more than it should that with her in her chair and me on the edge of the bed her face really is level with mine. Some people really are obnoxiously tall.  
  
Handing me an armful of cosmetics from the top of her desk, which I set beside me on the bed, Momomi smiles, her dark sightless eyes shining with satisfaction. “Okay, Rocky. Whenever you’re ready.”  
  
“Um, Momomi,” I ask hesitantly, “exactly how much makeup do you want me to use, here?”  
  
She shrugs. “However much I need. It’s not like I’ve seen my face lately, you know? If I didn’t trust your judgment, I wouldn’t have asked you.”  
  
 _You_  didn’t  _ask me,_  I think, sighing.  _You ordered me to do this.  
  
Come to think of it, Tezuka didn’t ask nicely either, and I helped_  her  _out too. I’m not really incentivizing people to be polite when they want something from me.  
  
That never changes._  
  
“All right,” I breathe, reaching for the liquid. “I’ll do my best.”  
  
Though with how she’s dressed it’s somewhat tempting to go with the bold, caked-on look some of the more kogal-esque girls at my old school enjoyed sporting, the strong, sharp angles of her face demand something a bit more subtle.  
  
“Concealer first,” I say resolutely. “I’m going to hold you still, okay?”  
  
She smiles, apparently just happy to be getting her way. “Yeah, whatever.”  
  
Gently placing a hand along Momomi’s forehead, I’m about to move in with the concealer but I’m stopped when she suddenly places her hand atop mine. The sudden warmth engulfing the back of my cold hand is so starting that I jump.  
  
“Rocky.”  
  
“Um. Yes?”  
  
“Did you ever see that old picture?” She smiles impishly at me, her voice sweet as antifreeze. “I think it won a Pulitzer or something. It’s like this picture of a man’s hand holding what looks to be a bird’s foot or something, but upon a second glance you can see that it’s actually the hand of this starving boy in Uganda?”  
  
“Momomi,” I say impatiently, “ _where are you going with this_?”  
  
“Where I’m going with this is that your weird tiny hands are freaking me out.”  
  
“Momomi!”  
  
“ _Kyahahaha!_ ” she cackles, that metallic sound tinkling right into my ear. It makes me want to scream, but I still haven’t fully recovered from the last time I tried that.  
  
I let my voice cut more sharply than before. “ _Momomi!_ ”  
  
“…haha _haha_ haha…”  
  
“Okay, whatever. Do your own makeup, then. I’m leaving,” I say tiredly, beginning to ease myself off the bed, but she suddenly reaches out and grabs my shoulder with surprising strength.  
  
“N-, no, heh,  _no_ ,” she says, forcing herself to power through the last trickles of laughter. “I, heheh, sorry. I couldn’t help myself. Please, stay. I  _do_  need your help.”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Oh, come on. Please. I’ll be good.”  
  
I consider leaving anyway, but ultimately I let myself fold. “Fine.”  
  
Covering one last laugh with her fist, she places her hands back in her lap to gesture me back, and, sighing, I move to apply the concealer, which was a step I didn’t want to skip—though she has good skin for the most part, there’s some pretty dark circles under her eyes that are better off unseen.  
  
“You know, though,” Momomi says thoughtfully, as I blend the concealer into her face, “that picture’s older than either of us. So that kid’s totally kicked it by now.”  
  
“I’m sure that if there was a chance that the child was going to survive to have a fulfilling life, the photographer would have passed them over for a more doomed-looking child,” I say dryly, finishing my blending and moving for the concealer.  
  
“ _My_ , so  _cynical_.”  
  
I decide not to respond to that as I move for the foundation brush.  
  
“Your timing really couldn’t be any more perfect, you know,” Momomi says casually as I begin to dab her face. “There’s usually an underclassman I chase down for this, but she isn’t in her room right now and I’m on a timetable.”  
  
“An underclassman?”  
  
“Yes. One of the brats downstairs. Though, to be honest, I haven’t the slightest idea what she looks like. I’ve never bothered to ask.”  
  
“Um,” I say dryly, “If you don’t know what she looks like, why do you trust her to do your makeup?”  
  
“Oh,” she answers brightly, brushing back her candy-red hair, “it’s because she’s slept with more boys than I even  _know_.”  
  
I almost drop the wet applicator I’m touching to Momomi’s face. I manage to catch it before it lands in her lap and ruins her lovingly-ripped skirt, but in the process I nearly fall off the bed and into her lap myself.  
  
“B-beg your pardon?!”  
  
“Well, so far as I can tell, it’s true,” she says nonchalantly. “That girl knows  _way_  too much about life for her age. I can’t seem to recall her name, though. Seaweed-something… I just call her Seaweed.”  
  
“Seaweed?"  
  
“Sure, you know. Like in a salad.” she says casually. “Anyway, she attracts a lot of a gossip during weeks where there’s not much else going on. Haven’t heard much about her lately, partially thanks to your escapades.”  
  
“My  _what_?”  
  
Momomi sighs, suddenly placing a hand on my shoulder. It makes me jump.  
  
“Rocky,” she says with a voice soft as caramel, her nose parallel with my own if not our eyes, “this is my room, so I’m going to be perfectly frank with you. You do this  _thing_ whenever you’re speaking that makes it  _really hard_  to tell whether you’re being coy or oblivious—”  
  
“Wait,  _what_? You can’t just—”  
  
“—Exactly like that. And right now I  _truly_  hope that you’re just being coy,” she breathes, tones of resignation creeping into her words, “because otherwise… this is just going to be sad.”  
  
“Sad? Momomi,” I say, frustrated, “ _please_  stop acting like I have any idea what you’re talking about. I  _promise_  you, I don’t. What  _are you talking about_?”  
  
“You really  _are_  serious,” she mutters. “Fine, I guess this is my responsibility, then.”  
  
She places her hands on her knees, as though bracing herself to tell a scary ghost story or something, and tries to look me as straight in the face as she can. There’s no mirth in her expression whatsoever.  
  
“Rocky, I am not exaggerating when I say that this school has an  _industrial-strength_  rumor mill. And I am  _not exaggerating_  when I say that every crippled little twit who lowers themselves to participate in it has spent their week talking about  _you_.”  
  
“ _Me?_  But why?”  
  
“Come on. You know perfectly well why. Transfer students are inherently rumor magnets  _on their own. Pretty, mysterious_  transfer students exponentially  _more_  so. And then to make matters worse, you had to get into that Clash of the She-Hobbits with one of the school’s beloved star athletes and nobody’s seen either of you since.”  
  
I wrinkle my forehead. “ _She-Hobbits_?”  
  
She giggles, almost messing up my attempt at blending. “Hee, yes. Get it? Because you’re both…”  
  
“ _I get it_ ,” I say flatly, suppressing a somewhat foreign urge to slug her.  
  
“At any rate, it’s been  _very obnoxious_  hearing the mob of harpies talk about you, especially since it’s been painfully obvious  _none of them_  have ever met you.”  
  
“That… that makes me really uncomfortable,” I admit, though it’s something of an understatement. Though I’ve been somewhat popular in the past, there’s a fine line between being well-liked and being treated like your entire life is some kind of scandal.  
  
“Yes? Well, look on the bright side. If there’s an album or something you’ve been waiting to drop, now would be the time.”  
  
I roll my eyes.  
  
“Well,” I say after a few moments spent silently tracing her lips with a red pencil, “if I want them to stop talking about me, I’m going to have to stop being interesting, I guess.”  
  
She surprises me by reaching for her tube of lipstick and applying it to her lips without my help. I suppose she can do that much on her own. “To be honest, I can’t see where you started.”  
  
I take a deep breath. “I walked right into that.”  
  
“At least it didn’t put you in the hospital this time.”  
  
She smiles again, that dark-eyed, self-confident smile, and unlike her earlier teasing humor, I can tell I’m supposed to smile along with her, but I can’t match it with one of my own. The accident in the hallway, the hospital… the memories are too fresh in my mind for me to joke about. I don’t even know if I’ll  _ever_  be able to joke about it. I mean, basically it’d be joking about death, about losing control, about discovering that ugly side of myself… I don’t see what’s so funny about that.  
  
Momomi seems to take note of my sullen silence, though, because her smile quickly clouds over. “Damn,” she mutters. “Too soon?”  
  
“Too soon,” I sigh.  
  
“Shit, I’m sorry,” she says, sounding genuinely contrite. “And here I was joking about it… We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.”  
  
“Thanks… I really don’t.”  
  
“I… do you want to take a break and hug Susa or something? It helps.”  
  
At the mention of his name, the dog lifts his head off the ground where he’s been curled up and sniffs at our feet curiously. He tires of it quickly, though.  
  
“Maybe later,” I say, finally mustering a weak smile. “Can we just talk about something else?”  
  
“Er, yeah, sure,” she says, now seeming a bit off balance. “You pick the topic, because I have no idea what you’re sensitive about.”  
  
“I… I don’t know,” I say, but then I’m reminded of a question I’d been wanting to ask for a while. “What about your boyfriend? Who is he?”  
  
This seems to be a more than acceptable change in topic, because Momomi’s face lights up. “Oh. Him? You wouldn’t know him, I don’t think. He isn’t a high school student. He attends the university out here.”  
  
“Wow. A college student? What does he study?”  
  
“French Literature, or something. I’m not really sure. I don’t care, actually. That’s not why I’m dating him.”  
  
“Why  _are_  you dating him, then?” As soon as the question flies out of my mouth, though, I find myself dreading the answer. And the way I phrased the question, actually, because I just realized how shallow I sounded.  
  
“Because, Rocky, he has the one quality I absolutely positively need the men in my life to have, and the one quality that every student attending this school lacks:  _Maturity_.”  
  
“Can you hold still? Mascara and all,” I drop casually, becoming more invested in the process than the conversation.  
  
“Oh, right, sure,” she says, making a concerted effort not to blink while I gently brush the rod along her already pretty-impressive lashes.  
  
“Anyway, yes.  _Maturity_ ,” she purrs, pointing her finger in the air for emphasis. “Given enough time and dedication, a lover can learn most other things needed to sustain a relationship, but maturity is the one quality that they need to  _start out_  having. Because frankly, I shouldn’t have to date a fixer-upper and wait around long enough for him to figure out he’s being a puerile jackass. If he  _ever_  does. I deserve better.”  
  
“I haven’t really gotten a chance to meet many of the boys around here,” I admit. “Are they really that immature?”  
  
“Oh my god, Rocky. They whine like  _babies_. I’ve never seen such an insufferable group of boys in my entire life. Well, not  _seen_. But, well, you know,” she says, making a vague wiggling gesture with her hands. “Anyway, that’s why I date college guys. The boys around here can just go screw themselves, for all I care. Or, I don’t know, maybe they can wait around to get checked off Seaweed’s bucket list, doesn’t matter to me. As long as they stay the hell  _away_.”  
  
“…Wow.”  
  
“Yes, well, If I wanted to spend time with infants, I’d go get knocked up.”  
  
 _…I don’t really know what to say to that…_  
  
“…So wait. Is that where you’re going to meet your boyfriend, then? The university?”  
  
“Yes. We’re going to spend the weekend out there.”  
  
“The whole weekend…? Does that mean you aren’t going to attend the Festival?”  
  
She guffaws. “Rocky, I just gave you my whole spiel about how important maturity is to me, and ten seconds later you’re asking me about the stupid  _Festival_?  _Of course_  I’m not going to the Festival. In fact, I’m spending the weekend with my boyfriend precisely  _because_  I want nothing to do with the Festival. I  _hate_  the damn thing.”  
  
“Adults attend festivals, don’t they?”  
  
“Adults  _bring their kids_  to festivals and have fun because their stupid kids are having fun. Adults that just show up  _alone_  to festivals are creepy and sad and weird. Besides, if you haven’t noticed,  _I’m completely blind_. How much fun do you think  _you_  could have at a Festival, in my shoes? Especially with all those little imps running around and groping my dog. Nobody gropes my dog but  _me_.”  
  
“But… didn’t you just give me permission—”  
  
“I only make an exception for you because Susa likes you. He’s usually totally ambivalent about people, which is why we’re perfect for each other,” she says, prodding the resting dog with her foot. He doesn’t respond, other than randomly deciding to spend a moment licking his chops.  
  
“Hey, stay still, unless you want me to jack up your eyeliner.”  
  
“Sorry. Anyway, yes. The Festival’s a waste of time. That’s why I never lifted a finger to volunteer for it. I made my feelings on the subject very clear to my class rep weeks ago. She didn’t press because she knew it was futile.”  
  
“You mean Satou?”  
  
“ _Oh_. I’d  _forgotten_ ,” she says, sighing deeply. “You met her, right? I heard about that. Well, that’s probably fine. I’m assuming the two of you got on like gangbusters, right?”  
  
“Well… yes, I suppose. I mean, she seemed like a really sweet person, and she was fun to talk to.”  
  
Her expression clouds over. “Forget it, then,” she mutters, “I’m not talking to you about Lilly.”  
  
 _What’s with this tone?_  I bring up her class rep and out of the blue, she doesn’t seem to be having fun with the conversation anymore?  
  
“I don’t understand,” I say, blinking at her. “She said you were friends.”  
  
“That’s a word she’s liberal with. That’s all I’ll say on the subject.”  
  
I can’t help but furrow my brow at that.  _So you aren’t friends but you’re on a given-name basis? That makes less sense than a lot of things I’ve heard today, which is saying something._  
  
“Fine. I’m almost done, anyway. I just need you to hold still for the other eye, and we’re done.”  
  
“Go ahead. I can hold still.”  
  
As I’m about to bring the brush to her eye, I’m suddenly reminded of something Lilly said to me on Thursday.  
  
“Lilly told me you said ‘hello’, you know.”  
  
“What?” She raises a perfectly-plucked eyebrow at me. “I  _never_  said that,” she snaps. “She completely made it up.”  
  
“Huh? Why would you even care about that?”  
  
“Because it isn’t true. Are you going to do my other eye or not?”  
  
Holding in a sigh, I move forward and trace the line of her eye. “Fine, there. You’re all set.”  
  
She smiles again, like a housecat who just got to gnaw on the leg of her hapless master, and stands up out of the chair. “Wonderful. How do I look?”  
  
“Like I just made you up, so pretty great,” I say, with a small sense of satisfaction. But then my eyes roll back down to her clothes. “Though…”  
  
“Though  _what_?” she asks accusatorily.  
  
“…Nothing,” I say, having the presence of mind to stop myself. “You’re going to turn heads, that’s all.”  
  
“Well, good,” she says with newly emboldened confidence. “I appreciate it, Rocky, really. I used to be able to do this myself, but, well…” she trails off.  
  
“You’re welcome, Momomi,” I say sweetly.  _I don’t know what kind of person it would make me if I refused her, and it certainly wouldn’t make living next to her any more pleasant._  
  
“Anyway,” she says absently, grabbing a dark leather purse off her desk, “I’m going to have to get going. I have a bus to catch.”  
  
“Sure,” I say, hopping off the bed—and narrowly avoiding stepping on one of Susa’s paws as I land, only for him to shift away at the last second. “I’ll be in my room, then.”  
  
“Here, I’ll follow you out. I’m done here, too.”  
  
She grabs a leash from a hook on the wall and attaches it to Susano’o’s collar, who doesn’t react much at first but finally stands up with a canine grunt and lazily follows us out of the room. In the hallway, Momomi takes a key out of her jacket and locks the door to her room, then turns back to me.  
  
“Well, Rocky, I guess I’ll be seeing you Monday morning, then.”  
  
I gape at her. “You’re coming in  _that_  late?”  
  
“Of  _course_. I wouldn’t want to get here before all the  _townies_  left. Besides, that allows me to spend as much time with my boyfriend as possible.”  
  
“Oh. Well, have fun, then.”  
  
“Believe me, I plan to,” she says with a devilish smirk. “You, too, if you think you can.”  
  
“…I’ll try. Bye, Momomi.”  
  
“Later, Rocky,” she says, turning toward the elevator corridor.  
  
I walk over to my door and begin fumbling through my school bag for the lock. Only a second passes before she turns around and calls to me.  
  
“Hey.”  
  
I turn back to her. “Yeah?”  
  
“I forgot to tell you,” she says wryly, “I’m glad you’re still around. Hang in there.”  
  
The corners of her eyes soften and she gives me what actually seems to be a completely, straightforward smile. It’s a little jarring to see, but after a moment I find myself smiling back.  
  
“I plan on it,” I reply. “Thanks.”  
  
She winks at me—only slightly missing the mark—and disappears down the corridor. Sighing, I unlock the door and step into my own room.  
  
Nothing’s changed since the last time I was here: it all looks exactly like how it did on Wednesday before I was rehospitalized in the halls. It’s reminiscent of where I was exactly a week ago, when I finally returned to my bedroom in Shibuya after my four months away, and not any more comforting.  
  
Kicking off my shoes, I drop my bag unceremoniously on the floor and pull myself onto the bed, lying down and staring the ceiling. Though it’s only been about an hour and a half since I was discharged from the hospital in Sendai, I feel utterly exhausted.  
  
To some degree, that’s because of the people I’ve had to put up with—but as far as excuses go, that’s a lousy one. Everybody else has to deal with these people, too, and I’m the only one struggling to understand, or struggling to find any kind of common ground, or even struggling to offer my trust. It just seems like they’re a bigger deal than they are because I’m still so messed up. They’re just like a drizzling rain bothering me as I step out of a lake.  
  
I spend an immeasurable amount of time in silence—a second, a minute, an hour, who cares—staring at the overhead light on the ceiling, letting my gaze drift out of focus. It’s kind of sad how much I’ve gotten used to doing this, drifting on my back from one strange, lonely room to another. Sometimes I feel like that eggplant comedian on the old game show, that naked guy who was locked in a small room for a year and forced to win sweepstakes until, at long last, he won a trip into an identical room.  
  
When I was younger, full of childish cruelty, I found that man’s suffering hilarious. It was just a stupid, gaudy television show, starring an ugly entertainer who looked incredibly obtuse. That he had spent so long in there, alone, without ever seeing his friends or family never even occurred to me, but if it had, I probably would have simply giggled. I knew he had signed up for this, after all—the  _schadenfreude_  at his expense was a service he was providing.  
  
But now there’s nobody keeping me in  _my_  room, either, and here I am, listlessly lying in bed without the slightest idea what it is I’m going to do about my life, or how I’m going to get out of here. And I can’t see what’s so funny about it anymore. Downtempo, indeed.  
  
There’s a crinkling in my uniform jacket as I roll onto one side—it takes me a moment of digging through it to remember that I still have the note Hakamichi handed to me earlier. Until now, I’d forgotten to read it. Well, no time like the present. I hope she didn’t expect me to read it the very moment she handed it to me.  
  
Unfolding the note, I can see that her handwriting is beautifully pragmatic, absent of flourishes but perfect in form. Even having written it in a moving vehicle, she’s managed to produce something nice to look at. It’s actually more of a letter than a note.  
  
 _Daidouji,_  the note reads,  
  
 _Misha won’t translate this for me. What I was going to say was that it would be a tragedy if you didn’t get to enjoy the Festival just because of one reckless student who didn’t care about the welfare of her schoolmates.  
  
I can’t help but feel somewhat responsible for your hospitalization. I knew already that Ibarazaki was notorious for running in the halls, so I should have done more than simply admonish her the last time I caught her doing so. Perhaps if I had, this week could have gone better for you.  
  
Lately, I’ve had the thought that what happened could ruin more than just your Festival experience. I wondered if it would ruin your entire year. And if that were the case, this school would have completely failed you.  
  
I just want you to know that, as your classmate, I would hate to see that happen. And if there’s anything I can do to help, I don’t want you be afraid to ask. I mean that.  
  
Continue doing group science work with Ikezawa if that suits you both—I actually admire that you became friends so quickly—but I hope Misha and I will still get to work with you on other subjects. We’d both still like to get to know you better.  
  
—Shizune._  
  
I read the note a few times over, and even then I’m still not entirely sure what to make of it. After two days of being an obnoxious adversary and a massive critic, she wants to start over again just because I had a near-death experience? Out of, what, misplaced guilt? Not knowing about my condition until now?  
  
But, even then, my cynicism isn’t coming to me as easily as I’d like. Even though by Wednesday morning I thought I’d essentially decided that I was sick of and wanted nothing to do with Shizune, that day and those decisions now seem like an eternity ago. And with the gift of hindsight, I can’t help but wonder if I didn’t let my conversations with Momomi color my feelings on the class president far more than anyone would think was prudent… especially since I’m getting the vibe that my neighbor delights in being contrarian.  
  
I don’t know… Maybe the class rep isn’t the self-involved tyrant I thought she was. I just don’t know what to think anymore.  
  
One thing I do know for sure is that after everything else I’ve had to and will have to deal with after the last few days, I’ll be more than happy to stop thinking of Shizune as a problem if she’s willing to stop acting like one. If only everything were so simple.  
  
Another thing I know for sure is that if I lie in this bed for another thirty seconds I’m going to jump out the window, so I hop off the bed and slip my shoes back on.  
  
I need to find something to do to distract myself, and right now it seems obvious that I’m not going to find it in this room. I can’t go swimming and I don’t feel like walking all the way into town either, so I need to find an activity some place closer to home. Maybe in one of the day rooms or something; I don’t know. I just know that I won’t find it here.  
  
Straightening out my uniform, I slip my room key into my jacket pocket and head back out the door. As I’m walking down the hallway, though, I’m struck with a question that I hadn’t noticed had still gone completely unanswered.  
  
 _Why did Misha refuse to translate any of that…?_


	18. Sky Full of Stares

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Boulders, Beanbags, and the Byford Dolphin.

“I-Iwanako!” Molly stammers, her swarthy complexion suddenly going unusually pale. “I didn’t… I mean… I didn’t—well, I knew you were back from the hospital, but, er—you—I didn’t expect to find you out here!” Her last words are all rushed together, like it was some final, desperate push to get to the end of the sentence.  
  
I quirk an eyebrow at her, puzzled by her seemingly totally unwarranted air of panic. Her eyes are bugging out like I caught her with both hands in the proverbial cookie jar. It’s the first time I’ve seen or heard from her since the hallway collision, and her behavior is troublingly odd.  
  
“Um. Sorry about that?” I blink at her, nonplussed. “I was just, um, sitting here, enjoying my book. …As one does.”  
  
For a while, I was trying to aimlessly wander the school grounds, being careful to maintain a wide berth around the mural (which I began thinking of as the “Tezuka Zone,”) but any student I passed by would shoot me looks, so I decided to make my way someplace quieter. Wandering behind the dormitories, I found an obscure, forgotten-looking little gate that led, delightfully, to a shady, wooded park. It didn’t look like anybody was around, and I was eager to get out of the sun, so I blithely made my way in. The path carved in a whole lot deeper than I was expecting, and once I realized that all this walking was becoming painfully close to meeting the Nurse’s forbidden standards of exertion, I decided to break off the beaten path and find some place to sit down and relax.  
  
That was how I came across this quaint, earthy little grove with plenty of shade and a flat, smooth boulder of gneiss right in the center, just perfect for sitting on. I’d meant just to cool down for a couple of minutes and make my way back to the school grounds, but the air was so nice, and the light was just perfect, and it was so quiet out here that I decided to take the opportunity to finish the book I started last night; I knew that if I didn’t finish it soon, I never would.   
  
A character had just been executed for stealing a teapot when Molly stumbled out from the trees, saw me, and suppressed a startled squeak. It was surprising for both of us, but evidently horrifying for her.  
  
“Is… everything okay? Am I not supposed to be out here or something?”  
  
“N, no, you’re fine!” She holds her arms out, as if pushing the question away. “I just—I just didn’t think I’d run into anybody out here, that’s all! And certainly not you, I mean… you look well! That’s great!”  
  
“Um. Thanks…?” I say, unnerved by her weird enthusiasm. “I came back from the hospital a few hours ago. I only needed a few days to recover.”  
  
“Yeah, hey, it’s great to see you! I was really worried about you! You looked pretty messed up when Ibarazaki slammed into you. It was really scary.”  
  
“I—” I pause, contemplating what I should say. Molly’s being so transparently nervous, bordering on shady, that this whole conversation feels uncomfortably phony. “Well, it wasn’t as bad as it probably looked,” I say, finally. “You know, I really wasn’t doing much in the hospital. You could have come by, if you wanted.”  
  
“Right, uh,” she stammers again, fingering one of her pigtails nervously, “I really would have! But we’ve been so busy with Festival preparations that there wasn’t really time and—”  
  
“No, sorry, I didn’t mean to come off as trying to guilt-trip you. It really wasn’t that important.”  
  
She seems to ignore my placating comment, though, as she glances over her shoulder for something in the distance. All right, I’m starting to get really sick of this. I’ve never seen somebody who so obviously had something to hide.  
  
“Molly, seriously,” I say, putting some steel into my voice—well, it’s aluminum at best, we’re not all blessed in the lower octaves—“Is something wrong? What is it you’re doing out here?”  
  
“No, no! Nothing’s wrong!” She waves her arms again for emphasis. “I just came out here for some air, and—I really am happy to see you, but the reception on my phone is terrible out here, so I’m going to head back to the school. See you tomorrow, maybe? Or on Monday, right?”  
  
“Wait—you don’t—”  
  
“Have a good evening, Iwanako! I’m glad you’re doing all right!”  
  
“Molly—”  
  
“See you!” she says, moving sharply back in the direction from which she came. It’s kind of awkward, because the slope of the ground against the gait of her prosthetic legs results in the most lackadaisical-looking retreat I’ve ever seen. I suppose we’re both supposed to participate in the illusion that she’s sprinting away, because that’s apparently what she’d be doing right now, were it possible. This is profoundly awkward.  
  
What on earth was that, Molly? Are we still friends, or…?  
  
Well, I suppose that for now it’s not really that important, one way or the other. I’ll run into her again eventually, and sooner or later I’ll find out why she keeps having these suspicious, frantic, moments. Not that I think it’s any of my business, but, well… she’s been doing a really poor job of establishing the boundaries of whatever kind of friendship we were supposed to be building, and it would be nice to know more clearly whatever’s going on with her.  
  
…Also, I need to figure out a tactful way to communicate that whatever brand of mascara she had on really wasn’t working for her.  
  
Sighing, I return to my book. It only takes me another thirty minutes or so to get to the ending, which is kind of pointless and depressing. I guess that’s supposed to be a metaphor, but I’m not really in the mood to puzzle it all out, so I close the book and set it back in my school bag.  
  
Checking my phone, I note that it’s almost five-fifteen. (I also note, wryly, that I’m getting fairly decent phone reception out here, so perhaps Molly uses a different carrier.)  
  
Really, though, perhaps it’s been absurd of me to think of Molly as a “friend.” We’ve known each other for, what, three days? Honestly, maybe even “knowing each other” is describing it a little too strongly. Getting right down to it, all I really know about her is that she’s from Kobe, has no legs, and belongs to the main clique of girls in our classroom. She was (mostly) welcoming and amiable for the first two-and-a-half days I was in class, and today she was blatantly disinterested and weirdly evasive. That’s breaking even at best.   
  
Then again, the pendulum also swings the other way. How much does anybody here know about me? Just that I’m from Shibuya, and that I’m bad at science class, and that I can’t swim, and that I have a potentially fatal heart problem. I’ve been intentionally holding back, both because I don’t truly believe there’s enough time left in the school year to establish fulfilling friendships and because I don’t want people to know how much of a disaster I am.  
  
(Really, though, the cat’s kind of out of the bag with that. The Ibarazakis saw my tantrum the other day, and Nurse definitely knows something’s up… If Yamaku really has “an industrial-strength rumor mill,” like Momomi said, it’s probably only a matter of time…)  
  
Of course, if I really want to be bold and self-critical—and I may as well, it’s a longish walk back to the dorms—I have to at least entertain the notion that my whole reckoning of the idea of “friendship” is and always has been absolutely godawful. I’ve always used the word “friend” to describe two starkly different collectives: those people I had absolute faith in and would follow straight into Hell (group membership: one), and those people I could tolerate long enough to chat with over afternoon tea on a semi-regular basis (group membership: literally every other friend I’ve ever had, ever.)  
  
That really was the dichotomy, before my heart attack—an enormous group of people who meant absolutely nothing to me, and a single person who…  
  
Hey! In fact, let’s not go there.  
  
At any rate, none of those friends are a part of my life anymore. My larger group of friends, particularly the girls from my old club, pretty much spat me out right after my heart attack, just as soon as I started to become emotionally needy…  
  
No, wait, I can’t absolve myself of responsibility for that. I rejected them. After the trauma of my heart attack, none of them seemed to know how to adapt… but even still, there were girls who continued to trickle in for a while… I think they were trying to understand, but I couldn’t be patient enough to wait for them to figure it out…  
  
…God, I can’t even trust my own memories. Did I really care? Did they really care? Were our friendships really as meaningless as they now seem, or was I the one at fault, for holding them to such an impossibly high standard?  
  
Small wonder I don’t have any friends right now. I can’t even get a grip on what it is I would even want from such a person, and even if I did, I bring so much baggage to the table that who even wants to deal with that?   
  
…My stomach starts to growl, cutting me off from any further introspection on the subject. I guess it’s been a while since I had anything to eat. Since the cafeteria would have reopened for dinner almost a half hour ago, I should probably avail myself of a meal before the room gets too crowded. Not that there’s ever a real dearth of open tables, but I really don’t want to deal with all of the staring and whispering I’d be subjected to during peak hours.  
  
The strap from my bag is starting to cut into my shoulder, though… It’s not especially heavy, but I’m not especially strong. What was I even thinking, bringing along the entire parcel of books Hanako brought me on my nature walk? I’d already finished two of them, and the fourth… The fourth book I didn’t enjoy enough to finish.  
  
I’m tempted to take the elevator back to my room and leave the bag on my bed, but then I realize I’m fooling myself—I’m done with them, and the cafeteria is in the main building anyway, so I might as well hit the library first and drop them off before they close. Not that I have any idea where the library is, but libraries are generally central locations in academic buildings, so if it’s here I’ll find it.  
  
As soon as I enter the first floor lobby, I find myself wishing I’d changed out of my school uniform. Even this late on a Saturday, when by all rights there should be nothing of interest in this part of the building, there are students lingering around, and as I pass them by they look at me like I’m literally on fire.  
  
For god’s sake, people. I almost died and then I didn’t. Get the hell over it.  
  
On the other hand… ‘Physician, heal thyself.’   
  
Well, as long as I have their attention, I might as well avail myself of it. One girl I pass by in particular is close to my height—so, almost certainly a first-year, I reticently admit—with a long ponytail superficially resembling some kind of Mesoamerican serpent deity. When my eyes meet hers, she freezes in place like I’m one of the Gorgons.   
  
…Seriously? What is with people today? What is with this school?   
  
“Hello,” I say to the girl, politely.  
  
A pause. “…Hello,” she finally squeaks back.  
  
Good, she’s probably not deaf. “You wouldn’t be able to tell me where the library is, would you?”  
  
Another long, bug-eyed pause. “Um. It’s… on the second floor, between the wings, past the double doors.”  
  
“Wonderful,” I say, bowing slightly in gratitude. “Thank you for your help.”  
  
I turn to head up the central stairway, but her voice rings out behind me. “Wait—”  
  
“Hmm?” I murmur, glancing back at her.  
  
Her lips part, as though she intends to say something else, but all she does is stand there, her jaw hanging ajar, for one long, immeasurable moment. “Sorry,” she says, at last. “…Never mind.”  
  
Then, before I can even narrow my eyes, she spins around and strides out of the lobby with surprising alacrity for somebody with… yes, that is, indeed, another prosthetic leg. Impressive.   
  
All right, then.   
  
Rolling my eyes with almost enough momentum to capture a quick glimpse of my frontal lobe, I head towards the staircase and make my way to the second floor. Thankfully, that’s the last uncomfortable encounter I have with anyone in the halls. There are people making an impressive racket in the various classrooms, though. Festival preparations, I guess.   
  
I keep forgetting how much tomorrow’s event seems to matter to the student body. For everybody else, it’s going to be the culmination of weeks of hard work and excitement, but for me… it’s just been this weird thing that people have been preoccupied with, this ostentatious distraction happening out in the far periphery of my increasingly-complicated life. Like Momomi, I’ve made no emotional investment in it whatsoever, but unlike her, I’m going to be participating in it nevertheless.  
  
But I think it’s that very ambivalence that’s making me stand out from everybody else. It makes me Other, makes me different. It makes Momomi different, too, but… Look how much shecared: she’s completely gotten the hell out of Dodge. That isn’t the same precedent I want to set. If I’m going to keep attending school, I don’t want to keep feeling… so aloof from everyone else’s lives.  
  
Heh. “Aloof.” Like my family is from me, now. Zero involvement whatsoever.   
  
That reminds me, though… If I’m not mistaken, Father’s secretary has a key to our home in Shibuya. On Monday I’ll have to call and ask if she swing by and have the rest of my old school uniforms express-delivered to Sendai. With Mother still gallivanting across the Occident, that’s the only way I’ll get my hands on them without taking the Shinkansen home myself, and there’s no way I can wear the same uniform for an entire fortnight.  
  
I don’t think that fabled “new shipment of Yamaku uniforms” is showing up before the end of the year, either, so I shouldn’t expect to switch over any time soon. Perhaps that’s for the best, given all the time I’ve spent perfecting the Windsor knot.  
  
Making a mental note of it, I push open the double doors to what almost certainly has to be the school library, if only because it’s the only room on this floor that isn’t blaring noise. And, indeed, the musty smell that immediately breezes into my face proves my intuition was correct.  
  
…Huh. Wow. This is actually a really, really nice library. I’m not entirely sure now what I was expecting. It’s quite a bit larger and nicer than the one at my old school, with high ceilings, lots of varnished wood and plenty of natural light. (That isn’t to say the previous LRC was terrible, but it was harshly fluorescently lit with tiny windows and lots of tacky motivational posters everywhere. This place is an elegant sanctuary in comparison.)  
  
Traditionally, I haven’t spent a lot of time in libraries. It’s not that I don’t enjoy books, but I wouldn’t call them my passion, and if I do want to kick back and enjoy a book, I’d rather take it someplace where I can order a bubble tea or something, or at least where I can enjoy some fresh air. Libraries seem so single-mindedly fixated on the sole purpose of reading that it just turns me off from spending a lot of time in them.  
  
This place, though... this is the first library I’ve ever been to where I could actually picture myself doing things. It just has this really inviting atmosphere.  
  
…Which makes it all the more puzzling that it’s a complete ghost town in here. Where is everybody?  
  
“…Hello? Is anyone there?” My voice softly cuts through the silence and goes unanswered.  
  
I don’t even see a librarian in here. What’s going on? Am I not supposed to be in here? Did somebody forget to lock the doors?  
  
Walking over to the library counter on the left side, I idly knock on the wood a few times, for the lack of a bell to ring or anything, but nobody shows up. Odd. Very odd.  
  
At least there’s a “book return slot” set into the counter, so I can dump the books off and let somebody check them in later. That’ll suffice, I suppose. I won’t be able to check anything out without a librarian present, but at least I accomplished what I set out to do.  
  
I gingerly slide each of my books down into the abyss behind the desk, and the reduced strain on my shoulder is of considerable relief. Not that a mere four books could ever be called “heavy,” but…   
  
Wait, who am I trying to fool? I’m a thirty-eight-kilo weakling with a heart condition. Four books are heavy.  
  
Anyway, with that taken care of, I’m free to head down to the cafeteria, but as long as I’m here, and the place is deserted, I really… just want to look around a little. This place is just…really neat, and it’s not like I’m in any hurry to get back to my dorm room.  
  
Maybe they have a selection of movies somewhere? I still have a giant stack from the hospital I haven’t watched yet, but with a library this size, there’s bound to be a couple films I’ll be dying to check out later.   
  
Let’s see… so these shelves have… Braille books? I think? They look like three-ring binders, right out of an office supply store or something. I kind of want to look at one, but I feel like I shouldn’t be messing around with them if I’m not blind.  
  
And these would be… audiobooks, probably also for the blind students. Oh, this one is narrated by one of my favorite actresses, though! I wonder if only blind students are allowed to check these out…  
  
I still can’t find where the videos would be, or if this library even carries them. I wind up drifting into an aisle full of large-print books, and have to loop back around to get back to where I started.  
  
Okay, let’s try the other side of the library, then, and start from the back, working my way in. All right, there’s a couple of reading desks arranged out here, and beyond them, you have the back wall—  
  
—a loud gasp! rings out, right from under me, and—!  
  
“Aiieee—!” I shriek, jumping back in horrified surprise. Chills rise up and down my body—  
  
“I-Iwanako!”   
  
…Oh. Oh god, my heart is pounding. Leaning on one of the desks to steady myself, I glance over and realize that only a meter or two next to where I was idly staring at shelves, there’s somebody—  
  
“Hanako. Oh god.”  
  
There’s a cluster of beanbags on the floor that I didn’t see before, and she was sitting on one so silently I didn’t even notice her until she was right under my nose, and, judging by the look on her face, we scared the hell out of each other... Oh god, I’m hyperventilating.  
  
“I’m so sorry,” I wheeze out. “I had no idea anybody was—“  
  
thump  
  
My chest clenches, and hand reaches instinctively for my chest—  
  
This… this is not good. There’s a telltale ache swelling under my sternum and slowly spreading out. It’s not unbearable yet—  
  
thump thump  
  
Oh, crap. No no no no no nonononononono shut up shut up SHUT UP STOP IT—  
  
Hanako’s eyes widen in fright and she rises straight to her feet. “Iwanako? Are y-you all right?”  
  
thump  
  
“Trying to,” Inhale. “figure that,” Inhale. “out,” Inhale.  
  
Breathing, that’s all it is. Just breathing. Don’t panic…  
  
thump  
  
“S-should I get the N-Nurse?”  
  
“Please don’t,” I manage to utter, clenching my fist so hard that my nails dig painfully into the skin.  
  
With my other hand, I vigorously massage my sternum, as though erasing a chalkboard. Supposedly that works. Come on. Come on…  
  
thump.   
  
And then…  
  
As quickly as it started, the scare fizzles out, as if to say we now return you to your regularly scheduled abnormality.   
  
I can feel the oxygen returning to my bloodstream, as though it were cool water putting out a fire. Gradually, mercifully  
my heart rate slows back down to what I’m told is its clinically-recommended level of awfulness.  
  
Ha! Not this time, you worthless piece of crap.   
  
Still breathing heavily, I make the “victory” sign with my hand to inform Hanako that the threat has been quelled. (For now.) Standing up a little straighter as my breathing returns to a more comfortable pace, I glance back at her and… Oh.   
  
Hanako looks absolutely terrified. She’s white as a cloud, and her hands are quivering.  
  
Good work, Daidouji, you stupid airhead jackass. Let’s just go around traumatizing people, since that’s apparently your M.O. now.  
  
“Hanako,” I breathe, “it’s over. It was just a scare. These things just… happen sometimes. I’m really, really, really sorry.”  
  
I can’t tell if my words wash over her or not—she’s just standing there, ramrod-straight, meeting my eyes with this utterly unconvinced expression. Is she holding her breath or just breathing shallowly? I can’t tell. Damn it.  
  
“No, seriously. It was nothing,” I tell her, trying to salvage something out of this mess. The last thing I need right now is to give somebody a panic attack over my stupid arrhythmia.   
  
Well, then? Think FAST.   
  
“I… look,” I say, pulling off my uniform blazer, exposing my short-sleeved shirt and vest. “You can feel my heartbeat and see for yourself. Completely back to normal…”  
  
For a couple seconds, she still doesn’t respond. Then, finally, mercifully, her right hand delicately reaches towards me a few centimeters, then ragdolls back to its previous position, as though she’s still unsure how to proceed.   
  
Well, it looks like I’ve gotten my foot in the door, at least.  
  
“Here,” I say gently, reaching out for her hand with my own. She glances down at it skeptically, but very carefully holds out her hand again for me to take it.   
  
Whew.   
  
I wrap my thumb and forefinger around her wrist as though it were a flute of champagne—as always, my hands are ice-cold, and even worse in this air-conditioned library, so I only place my hand on the fabric of her sleeve to give her less of a shock—and, having met with no resistance thus far, I gently guide her hand to the area over my heart.   
  
As I slide her fingers under my necktie, I quickly note in passing that her still-shaking hand is covered in the same sort of burn scars that cover her face, but now isn’t the time to think about that.  
  
You got me into this mess, heart. Only fair you get me out of it.   
  
Heartbeats are usually hard to detect without a stethoscope, even if it’s your own, but ever since my heart attack, my heart is, well, for the lack of a better word, loud, like an engine that seriously needs maintenance. Which is pretty much what it is, frankly: a clunker held together with what Hikaru would have called ‘duct tape and penetrating oil.’  
  
That is, if he’d shown up once during the entire time I was in the stupid hospital…  
  
As soon as her fingers are firmly planted upon the part of my chest where the heartbeat would be strongest, I can see her posture gradually begin to slacken, though concern remains on her face.  
  
After what feels like a miniature eternity, she finally speaks. “I-It’s… It’s not…”  
  
Since she’s obviously uncomfortable talking about it, I try to fill in the blanks for her. “…Not on tempo, right? Like there’s… an absurdly unskilled drummer living in my ribcage.”  
  
Quietly, she nods, and pulls her hand away. Though I meant for that comment to be amusing, the reaction I get is merely a slightly more relaxed look of concern. Well, progress is progress.  
  
“That’s more or less what arrhythmia is,” I tell her, trying to sound as casual about it as possible. “That’s my ‘normal.’ When my heart beats any faster, that’s when things start to get scary.”   
  
It’s not that this is anything close to being the kind of thing I’m comfortable talking about, but Hanako has this preternatural ability to catch me during moments of weakness, so I guess that makes it easier. She already saw me in bloomers, without any makeup on, and my scar fully visible, so she might as well have seen me buck naked for all the added difference it would have made.  
  
“B-but,” she asks softly, “you’re okay n-now?”  
  
Sure, totally…  
  
No, I feel like that would be too transparent a lie. She saw me during the hospital on the lowest day of my life, at least in recent memory, and now she’s witnessed this stupid mistake. Better just to tell the truth and keep her in confidence. Hanako seems trustworthy in a way that Molly, for example, definitely doesn’t, though it’s not like my parents raised me to be a flawless judge of character.  
  
“To be perfectly honest,” I sigh, “‘okay’ isn’t really in my repertoire. But, yes, I’m soldiering on.”  
  
Hanako simply gives a knowing nod, as though that’s a concept she’s extremely familiar with.  
  
After all that excitement, I’m feeling a little lightheaded. “Hey, umm,” I add nonchalantly, “that took a lot out of me. Can we take this to the beanbags?”  
  
There’s a bit of lag as she parses my words, but she exclaims “Oh!”, and nods again, sitting back down on the beanbag she was on when I stumbled in. There’s a book sprawled open on the carpet, which I assume she must have been reading and dropped at some point during all that excitement.  
  
As much as I’d like to just plop backwards onto the beanbag beside her, I think my chest has suffered enough punishment for this week, so I do the responsible thing and lower myself gently. I just succeeded in defusing what was almost certainly a crisis situation. No need to risk throwing that all away by taking irresponsible—if cathartic—actions.  
  
If anybody else were around I wouldn’t dream of doing this, but I take my tie off, too, and undo the top two buttons of my shirt. I’d like to be able to breathe a little more easily.  
  
Okay, now this is refreshing.   
  
Hanako takes her book off the floor but lays it dormant on her lap. As I stretch out on the beanbag, she watches me carefully, still closely monitoring me for any signs of distress.  
  
“By the way,” I say drolly, leaning my head up to face her, “in case nobody’s told you yet, I’ve been discharged from the hospital.”  
  
Finally, finally, the ghost of a smile. The first one I’ve seen from her so far, I think. I don’t think I’ve ever had to work so hard for one in my life.  
  
“God, Hanako,” I sigh, “I’m really sorry about this. I totally crashed your reading session, didn’t I?”  
  
That apology doesn’t seem to sit well with her, because she suddenly gets a little more animated, shaking her head. “Y…you don’t h-have to apologize…”  
  
“No,” I say softly, “after what happened this week, I should have been more conscientious that a lot of people would be really concerned about… that happening to me again. And then, here I am, practically dropping it into your lap like this—”  
  
“It’s… it’s fine,” she says, not wanting me to take it any further than that. “I’m just… happy you’re b-back.”  
  
I smile at that, and though it’s always kind of hard to tell with her given how often she obscures her face, I think she brightens a little in return. “Thanks! I’m glad to be back. Even though people are making it really weird…”  
  
“W…weird?”  
  
I wave the comment off dismissively. “I just seem to be attracting a lot of strange behavior today, that’s all.”  
  
“Um… what do you mean?”  
  
Since I brought up the subject, I may as well tell her. “Well, for one thing, a lot of students have been staring at me lately, or whispering to each other, like I’m literally—”  
  
I stop myself in my tracks. I almost reused the metaphor I thought up earlier, that the students were looking at me like I was ‘literally on fire,’ but my internal censor stepped in at the very last second to remind me that I was about to plunge into the most tasteless simile ever.  
  
“—Sasquatch.”  
  
Hanako blinks at me for a moment. “…Huh?”  
  
“You know,” I deadpan. “Bigfoot.”  
  
She gives me a stare so blank I could print a resumé on it.   
  
Nailed it.   
  
“Um… that’s kind of like a yeti.”  
  
She furrows her brow, and those huge amethyst eyes of hers track the ceiling in thought before locking with my own. “Y… you mean like they’re s-scared?”  
  
“No… not scared, I don’t think,” I answer thoughtfully, shaking my head. “Well, now that I think about it, maybe some of them are worried—or apprehensive, I guess, is the better word. As though they think that if they so much as brush past me, I’ll… spontaneously combust.”  
  
Well, I guess that’s a fire-related simile too. Maybe I should have said ‘explosively decompress.’   
  
Hanako’s gaze pensively drifts from my face to its reliable position on the carpet. She seems lost in thought, pondering my words. Maybe she doesn’t believe me? It’s so hard to get a read on her.  
  
“Er, I don’t think any of them are actually worried for my own sake, or anything like that. I’m not that egotistical.” But I’m probably pretty close. “I suspect that it’s all very self-interested. Nobody wants what happened to Ibarazaki to happen to them.”  
  
As soon as I say ‘Ibarazaki,’ she seems to snap out of her thoughts and her head turns to face my own with enough torque to send her hair-fringe whipping out of her face for a moment, giving me a quick look at her ever-elusive right eye, which is awash with concern. “W-what happened to Emi?”  
  
What on earth…? I can feel myself grimace in befuddlement.  
  
Hanako is on a given-name basis with Ibarazaki?   
  
Are they actually friends? How friends many does Ibarazaki have?   
  
It just makes me wonder: how many people—at this school or elsewhere—would hate me if they knew what I said to her? More people than the ones who hate her for what she did to me, that’s certain.   
  
Even if things had turned out... badly for me, that would almost surely be the case. For god’s sake, I’m part of a culture that practically forgave a man for murdering and cannibalizing a Dutch woman. Had I taken a dirt nap on Wednesday, people would still be more concerned about her. I’ve read more than enough true crime novels to understand how ‘public sympathy’ works.  
  
Momomi said Ibarazaki was a “beloved star athlete,” right? And now she’s off the track team. Maybe that’s why I’ve been getting all those looks; people just blame me for taking their school idol out of commission. Perhaps they even suspect she’s not coming back at all, and they’d much rather have her around than me. (There’s a chance she won’t come back, after those things I said to her.)  
  
Is that what the rest of the school year is going to be like, then? A struggle to justify my continued presence over that of the girl everybody admired? If that’s going to be the case, maybe Ishould just drop out. I don’t even know who would blame me.  
  
My parents might not even notice for months…  
  
“Iwanako…?”  
  
Hanako’s soft, but increasingly alarmed voice derails me from that train of thought. Oh, that’s right. She asked a question, and it’s obviously eating away at her.   
  
“Ibarazaki’s with her mother,” I answer honestly. “Supposedly she’ll be back in time for exams. I don’t know the details.”  
  
Iwanako Daidouji: Resident Subject Matter Expert on the Girl Who Almost Killed Her, apparently.  
  
I like Hanako, but I swear, if anybody else tries to hit me up for information on Ibarazaki’s whereabouts… No, scratch that. I don’t swear anything, because that’s absolutely going to happen over and over again and I won’t be able to deliver on whatever it was I was about to threaten to myself.  
  
“Anyway, she won’t be around for tomorrow,” I tell her, since she still has that horrible troubled look on her face. “With how things are going, I might skip out on it too,” I add, almost as an aside.  
  
“B…because of the s-stares?”  
  
“That, and other things,” I sigh. “I think my heart is in… I don’t know, a state of heightened sensitivity or something, after what happened. Or maybe I’m just expecting heart flutters to happen now, and that makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy…”  
  
‘A disaster waiting to happen.’ That’s what the Nurse called me just a few hours ago. Loathe as I am to admit it, he’s probably right, at least about that part.  
  
I glance back to Hanako, who looks as though there are a million things she’s holding back on saying. I don’t think she’s finding a lot of joy in this conversation. I’m about to apologize again for dragging her into my vortex of depression when she suddenly speaks up.  
  
“I’ll… be in here, I th-think. It’s… quietest in here.”  
  
It takes me a second to realize what she means by that. “Tomorrow, you mean?”  
  
She nods silently. “I…I’m going to bring something to eat, s-so that..”  
  
“Ah,” I nod in understanding. “So you’re kind of like Momomi, then…”  
  
At my words, she stiffens in her seat, looking at me like I just suggested the Bombings were politically justified. “Wh-what…?!”  
  
“Um, you know,” I say cavalierly, raising a puzzled eyebrow at her reaction. “You’re both… boycotting the Festival, in your own ways. She left for the University a few hours ago.”  
  
“…Oh,” she murmurs, settling back down on her beanbag like a mother hen. “I g-guess so… It’s… going to be c-crowded and noisy. Even… even in the dorms.”  
  
I quietly nod at her words. Right, because everybody’s going to be bringing their families over... Well, with Momomi gone, and my family absent, our hallway should be relatively clear of guests, but beyond that…?  
  
God, this Festival-aversion is contagious. The more I hear about it, the more I want to get away from it.  
  
I could probably take a bus into the city, but if I did that, I’d be on my own. It’s not like that would really be much of a problem—I’m not scared of getting lost or accosted or anything—but if somebody on the streets of Sendai crashed into me the way that Ibarazaki did… well, without an informed medical staff present, and in my current state, the smart money says that I’d be done for.   
  
And I could probably walk down the hill into town, but… I’m not so sure I could walk back up the hill without exerting myself, which would normally be fine, if I could avail myself of Mr. Ufu’s services, but I doubt the shuttle will be going tomorrow. I’d either have to hitch a ride back up or make phone calls until somebody was sent to collect me, most likely afterhours. Not really an ideal situation.  
  
Geez, talk about a gilded cage.  
  
“I think I’ll have to play along tomorrow. For a few hours, at least,” I mutter, ending my contemplations. “You know I already told Lilly I would. Misha and Shizune want to see me out there, too.”  
  
Hanako nods somewhat vigorously, apparently in full agreement that, if nothing else, I shouldn’t disappoint her friend.  
  
“M-maybe… you shouldn’t wear th-that uniform tomorrow?”  
  
“Huh?”  
  
“If y-you’re casually dressed, then… maybe the other students won’t stare as much…”  
  
“Oh, right,” I nod, smiling. “This thing—” I say, tugging on my vest for emphasis, “makes me way too conspicuous. I’ll definitely wear something different.”  
  
Honestly, I should have taken it off as soon as I got done with Momomi… I’m naturally so accustomed to wearing it that it didn’t occur to me it was going to be a problem until I went wandering the school grounds.  
  
Ostensibly pleased at having offered me some useful advice, Hanako actually smiles back at my words—a real smile, albeit a hard-to-see one. It’s a surprisingly uplifting sight, though she does her best to hide it.  
  
You really have a gorgeous smile, though I know you’d never believe me if I told you. That’s just our burden as women, I think…  
  
“Um, Iwanako? Wh-what were you… doing in the library before…?”  
  
I snort. “Before I almost walked on top of you?”  
  
She nods, looking like she’s still trying to decide whether it’s okay to find that funny or not.  
  
“I came to drop off the books you checked out for me, actually. I didn’t want you to get saddled with late fees, or anything like that.”  
  
She quirks her head at me, puzzled. “They w-wouldn’t have—” she pauses as something occurs to her, and the whole tone of her voice changes, the pitch rising slightly. “Y…you read through them all?”  
  
“That’s the only way I made it through the rest of my stay there without losing my mind,” I say, smiling gratefully. “The one with the telepathic dragons was kind of grim, but I loved the other three.”  
  
She seems so surprised. “R-really?”  
  
I nod emphatically. “Really. I spent all of yesterday and most of today reading through them.”  
  
Hanako abruptly twists her head away, staring down at the carpet by the wall, precluding me from getting a good look at her face. Out from under her blanket of hair, though, I can just barely make out a dancing glimmer in her left eye.   
  
“I’m… I’m glad,” she says, so softly it’s almost a whisper.  
  
It… it really means a lot to her that she was able to help out, doesn’t it?   
  
Inwardly, I sigh. One really doesn’t need to be a good judge of character to know that Hanako is a genuinely good person. I’ve been aware of that since she suddenly dropped in on me in the hospital.   
  
And, yet…  
  
There’s something about her… I can’t quite pin down what it is, but… it’s like whenever I see her, I can’t help but be reminded of that ten-year-old girl who died of cancer, the one I thoughtlessly tormented. Momiji. Her name was Momiji. I’ll never be able to forget that.   
  
Maybe that’s the point; maybe that’s why I keep coming back to it. It took me until after my heart attack to realize that I was… not a good person, but the arrhythmia isn’t what made me that way. It’s just what brought it into the open, like a termite-infested building that looks sturdy until a light earthquake shakes it into splinters.  
  
I don’t want to be aloof anymore, and I do want to have friends again, but—  
  
Just then there’s a strange rumbling inside me, and I jerk upwards from my supine position on the beanbag, startled. I almost reach for my chest again before I realize that the rumbling is coming from a little further south.  
  
Oh, that’s right, I’m starving. False alarm.   
  
Worriedly, Hanako glances back at me, my sudden motion having caught her attention.  
  
“Sorry,” I say placatingly. “I’m just a little jumpy right now. I need something to eat, is all.”  
  
“Oh… I see,” she says, relaxing slightly.  
  
“I think I’m ready to grab dinner,” I say, pushing myself off the beanbag and back to my feet. “Would you like to come along?”  
  
Her eyes narrow like she’s suppressing a wince, apparently not enthused about the invitation. “Um… w-well, I’m almost done with my book, so…”  
  
“Sure,” I nod, buttoning my shirt. “Some other time, then.”  
  
“Y…yes,” she says, nodding with just enough conviction that I believe it. “Some… other time.”  
  
“I don’t know how much time you generally spend in the dorms,” I mention casually, as I lethargically re-knot my necktie, “but my room number is three-fourteen, if you ever feel like swinging by.”  
  
Her lips quietly curl into a bashful, almost childish smirk, as if there’s something about that she finds particularly amusing.  
  
“…What’s so funny?”   
  
“Th-that’s pi.”  
  
“Hee, I guess it is,” I muse, pulling my blazer back on from where I set it down on the waist-high shelf. “I honestly hadn’t given it any thought.”  
  
Wrapping my school bag back over my shoulder, I turn to face her. “Well, I guess I’ll see you on Monday, then? Or tomorrow, if I get sick of people.”  
  
“Y-yes… I’ll be here.”  
  
“Goodbye, Hanako.”  
  
Turning around, I take a few steps to turn back down the main aisle when her soft, reluctant voice rings out behind me again, quietly enough that I’d never have heard it if we weren’t in an empty library. “Iwanako?”  
  
“Hmm?”  
  
“T-thank you,” she says, a genuine smile warmly showing through her curtains of hair. “F-for showing me… your...”  
  
“…Arrhythmia?”   
  
She nods silently, clearly relieved I finished the sentence for her.  
  
“You’re welcome, Hanako,” I say, with a wan smile. “But… I should really be thanking you, you know.”  
  
Her dark-purple brow furrows in my direction in obvious puzzlement. “W-why?”  
  
“Well, for a lot of things, really,” I say wistfully. “For the books, obviously, but also… for visiting me in the hospital at all. Honestly… until you and Lilly showed up, things… things were going pretty badly. So I suppose what I’m saying is, thank you for caring.”  
  
I’m not sure if she looks surprised or concerned, but I don’t have long to decide before she glances away from me again. In the ensuing silence that follows, there are several moments where she looks like she wants to tell me something, but each time she stops herself.  
  
“T-then…” she says, not meeting my gaze again, “you’re w-welcome, Iwanako.”  
  
As dare I ponder to ponder what she’s thinking, another silence passes over us awkwardly, as though neither of us knows how to end the conversation. Finally, I decide to take the initiative.  
  
“Good night, then.”  
  
“N-night.”  
  
Leaving it at that, I turn down the aisle and make my exit, pushing all of this out of my mind. There’s so much about this that I need to seriously contemplate, but not when I’m tired and malnourished.


End file.
